Downtown Pittsburgh as seen from Mt. Washington.

I spent a little more than half of my first fourteen years living in suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That alone would make it a place of fond memories, but it was also in Pittsburgh that the cardinal events in my musical development occurred. In the last issue of Opus Pocus I wrote of one of those events, my first experience of live professional music courtesy of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. I left Pittsburgh at the age of fourteen and, except for a few short visits over the next seven years, I never went back.

Then last May I decided to visit the places where I grew up and to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony again.

A secret introduction to the classics

In my preschool and primary years we lived in the borough of Bridgeville, a little railroad and industrial town about ten kilometres west of downtown Pittsburgh. In the late forties it was still surrounded on three sides by open country, but even then it was being absorbed into the city's suburban sprawl. It seemed to me a good place to be at the time though it was and is a working-class community where I'd probably have trouble fitting in nowadays.

That wasn't too big an issue for my parents in 1947 when we moved into a tiny, brand new bungalow in a brand new baby-booming subdivision on Ridge Road. It was right at the edge of the borough where residential streets gave way to farm land. It represented a "move up" from the public housing we'd lived in in Wyndham, Ohio.

My parents, fine people though they were, weren't particularly "cultured." The only books in the house were my story books, a Bible, a dicitionary and three textbooks on Aviation. My dad was a pilot in those days. But they did have a small pile of 78-rpm records, mostly classical, that contained perhaps as much as three hours worth of music. They also had a tiny record player. The only time either came out of the closet was when Mom was off at her bridge club. Dad would get the stuff down from the shelf, set it up and play snippets from Scheherezade or the Romeo and Juliet Overture or, less frequently, the Lone Ranger Song which I eventually learned to call the William Tell Overture. Dad called these sessions "our secrets."

I guess I wasn't very good at keeping secrets. At least I remember, on evenings when Mom was going out, asking at the dinner table, "Daddy, will we have a secret tonight?" The record player soon broke and that was the end of that, but I've been able to hum the principal themes from those three chestnuts virtually all my life.

A great awakening

My family left the Pittsbugh area in March of 1952 and, after living near Reading, Pennsylvania and Cincinnati, Ohio returned in the fall of 1955 to settle in Crafton, another borough in the Pittsburgh area. We lived there for three years during which my love of music crystalized and became one of my life's main themes. If I'd been unlucky in my attempts to become musical before we moved to Crafton, I was exceptionally blessed for the three years we lived there.

At St. Philip School I joined the boys choir, directed in those days by one Sister Annina. I also got a grounding in elementary theory and even a bit of solfegio from Sister Mary Monica, an elderly lady with old-fashioned ideas about curriculum. About six months after settling in Crafton, my parents finally agreed to my having violin lessons and a few months after that, I attended my first concert.

I'm not sure that any other two hours of my life were as decisive as those I spent hearing the Pittsburgh Symphony that first time. Hearing it again last May was one of the highlights of my junket to the scenes of my childhood. Another was a visit with Sister Annina, the only one of my early music teachers still living.

Indeed, I was surprised to learn that she was still alive and still at St. Philip, albeit well into her eighties, retired and infirm. We had a wonderful time visiting, swapping memories and a bit of gossip and, I think, feeling blessed that we should come together once again so late in our lives. I was shocked and saddened to learn that in the forty-six years since we had last seen each other, only two other students had taken the trouble to look her up.

Today's Pittsburgh Symphony

You might imagine that hearing an orchestra for the first time in nearly half a century would not remind me much of my first experiences with it. But you would be mistaken. Despite the fact that the PSO had a new home and could scarcely have had any of the same players as in the 'fifties, I recognized the sound almost at once.

After my family left Pittsburgh, I was always disappointed in the orchestras I heard, at least where solidity and sheer volume of sound were concerned. I assumed that Syria Mosque, where the PSO performed in my youth, was an unusually loud auditorium. But the orchestra sounded just as robust and forceful in Heinz Hall, its new home, and also played with the same musical personality that I'd all but forgotten over the years.Very occasionally its arresting power was accompanied by an opacity of texture, but all in all I was mightily impressed by the greatness of the orchestra.

Guest conductor, James Conlon, opened the concert with Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. That seemed exqusitely fitting for the occasion, though I suppose if he had also conducted Scheherezade and the Lone Ranger Song it would have been better still.

Conlon then led the orchestra in Victor Ullman's Symphony no. 2. This was Ullman's last work before he was carted off to Auschwicz to be murdered, and is generally reckoned his greatest. I hadn't heard it before, but it is assuredly a major masterwork, and it's hard to imagine a finer interpretation than Conlon's or an orchestra that could render it more compellingly. The final work on the program was Dvorák's Symphony in D minor, a more familiar work to be sure, but one that came off beautifully.

There were other things about the concert that reminded me of the PSO in the fifties. The male musicians did not wear tuxedos. Like their counterparts in Cincinnati, they wore dark business suits and ties. More unique to the PSO now and back in the fifties was an item of protocol. The concertmaster is not applauded. Like everyone else, he wanders onto the stage when it suits him and warms up with the others. When it comes time to tune, he merely stands and nods to the oboe player.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Culture in Pittsburgh

Even in the first half of the last century, when the air was so besmogged that businessmen had to go home at lunchtime to change their shirts, Pittsburgh was a fairly cultured place. That's due largely to people like Mellon, Frick and, above all, Carnegie having made their fortunes there. An area in the eastern part of the city, Oakland, was the most generously endowed educuationally, culturally and even with sports facilities. The Pittsburgh Pirates played in Forbes Field adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Steelers's stadium was just blocks to the west.

The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning, billed as the world's tallest school house, dominated the area then as now, but the Carnegie School of Fine Arts, where I attended my first chamber music concert and later a summer orchestra school, was of more interest to me. It was part of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, nowadays merged with the Mellon Institute to form the Carnegie-Mellon University. It was nestled into Schenley Park, one of three major green spaces in that part of the city, and I spent many happy hours walking along its shaded paths, thinking up tunes for the exercises assigned in theory class. The fact that Beethoven once did much the same thing was not lost on me.

Next to Syria Mosque, where the Symphony performed, the most important building for me in Oakland was the Carnegie Institute, a rambling stone structure that housed museums of fine arts, archeology and natural history. It also housed the Carnegie Music Hall with its four-manual organ and the original Carnegie Library. Through the facilities in this building, I was able to acquire a smattering of general culture and hear free organ recitals on Sunday afternoons when the Symphony wasn't performing.

Best of all was the library. There I could listen to records that I could never have afforded to own. And there I saw my first orchestral scores, laboriously taught myself how they worked, how to follow them and, in time, how to make good use of them.

Oakland was undoubtedly Pittsburgh's cultural centre in the 'fifties and still has much to offer. But the "official" cultural centre is now downtown around Penn Avenue in an neighbourhood that was seriously fading back then. Two or three neglected movie theatres in the grand old style, hole-in-the-wall wholesalers and the Pennsylvania Rairoad station dominated the area.

Now the theatres have been reclaimed, refurbished and given new identities. The Symphony, the Pittsburgh Opera, theatre and dance companies all have excellent homes right downtown these days.

One final note. When I visited Sister Annina, she mentioned that the church organ, now nearly half a century old, was made in Québec. Looking into it later, I was not surprised to learn that it is a Casavant. What did surprise me was that it was installed to replace an instrument donated about fifty years earlier by Andrew Carnegie.

I didn't realize that his philanthropies extended to organs for Catholic churches, but I was pleased to find out. Despite his reputation as a ruthless captain of industry, vast numbers of people, myself included, owe him a great deal for the cultural and educational opportunites he provided for ordinary people.