SONIC TRANSPORTS: GLENN BRANCA ESSAY, PART 7

Another Italian Libra

When Giuseppe was eight years old, his parents gave him a harpsichord for a present. It was a small, battered old thing with broken strings, but the boy would fool with it for hours at a time. One day, Giuseppe was fooling around as usual when, purely by accident, his fingers hit a C-major chord. He was thrilled, yet he wasn’t able to recapture that interesting sound. All afternoon he tried to find it again, getting madder and madder when he couldn’t, until he grabbed a hammer and banged the harpsichord even more battered and broken. As he grew up, Verdi took up the flute, clarinet, and horn, but he couldn’t figure out a way of playing C-major chords on those instruments either. Maybe that’s why he decided to become a composer.[1]

– Victor Borge

FOOTNOTE

Victor Borge, My Favorite Intermissions. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971, p. 98.

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Essay, part 8

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Glenn Branca Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on Glenn Branca, see:

Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition

Music Book: Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers

Music Lecture: The Secret of 20th-Century American Music

Music: KALW Radio Show #1, A Few of My Favorite Things…