Read Time: 02:06
Imagine, if you can, a time before apps that identify music instantly; go back and remember, if you can, a time before radio stations needed websites, before algorithms reiterated music you already definitely like. If you can’t imagine such far-away times, you can Google them.
During the wild, grungy and flannel-filled years known as the 90s, I came across one of these idiosyncratic pieces of music you love so suddenly and incredibly that you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard it.
I was in college in San Francisco, reading philosophy in a computer lab. The song passed on through the radio without my knowing its name. And it didn’t have lyrics, because it was a classical song. I should have acted resourcefully and written down the timestamp and just called the radio station, but as I mentioned, I was in college, and I was studying philosophy.
Back then, we had Netscape, but that was only a browser; it wasn’t a Google. No YouTube. No Shazam. No Spotify. (Imagine!) I couldn’t figure out the song, its name, its composer. All I knew was that there was a clarinet and a piano. And I loved that clarinet.
During quiet or elapsed moments while drinking water or waiting in the car, wonder about the clarinet would sneak up on me, and then I would wonder about me still wondering about the clarinet.
For years this went on. Friends would ask me about (what happened to) the nice guy I’d been seeing, and I’d wonder about the clarinet. I’d be in the grocery store figuring which garbage bags were cheapest, pondering the stupidity of people buying garbage bags to line garbage cans at all, and deciding that we should all just line our garbage cans with dollar bills instead. And then I’d wonder about the clarinet.
Like I said, this went on.
Six, maybe seven years later, when San Francisco still had a classical radio station (and people were still riding around in wicker carriages drawn by horses, obvs), the radio is on, and there are the opening notes of the Prelude. I’m uncertain for a few measures, but then yes. There is the piano! The clarinet! And this is when I come to know Gerald Finzi’s “5 Bagatelles for Clarinet & Piano.”
The very definition of bagatelle is ‘a thing of little importance.’ It’s a trifle, a trinket, something purely decorative, like a bauble or knickknack. Like the way we treat wonder and remembering and old things in a world apparently very busy with its progress, its purpose, its diet.
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