Music Touches Me for the First Time

I can still remember the day when music first spoke to me. It was like being able to see after having been blind—only for me it was like being able to feel for the first time. I don't remember the date, but my best guess is that it was either in the summer of 1944 or 1945. At the time we were living on a farm half way between Blue Hill and Red Cloud in south-central Nebraska. The day was not unlike any other day on the farm: the cows needed to be milked. Among other chores, it was my job that day to carry the fresh whole milk from the barn to the house where the milk was being separated—a process where the cream is separated from the milk by machine. In those days, we did most things by hand, including milking the cows. If I remember correctly, we were then milking nine or ten cows, morning and night. The cream separator, as we called it, was also powered by hand. (You can still see these old hand-cranked separators being used throughout the Midwest even today—only they are no longer being used for separating cream from milk: instead, they are now being used as a decorative base to support a mailbox. My neighbor in Lincoln had one sitting in front of his house.) I loved to hand crank the separator. It made a beautiful humming sound. It also required a steady exertion of force on the operator's part. You couldn't go to sleep on the job or forget the rhythm. Then, too, the separator was in the cellar, under the house, which made it warm in the winter and cool in the summer. On this particular day, my brother was operating the separator and my mother and sister were milking the cows; this left me carrying the milk.

Anyway, on this day, we were all enjoying our work more than average because we had just bought a new set of batteries for the battery powered radio—which was always a special treat, in that the new batteries would make the radio both clearer and louder. And as an added treat we hung the radio from the windmill tower, in the middle of the barnyard, and turned up the volume so that everyone could enjoy the music as they worked.

It was then that music first spoke to me. I can still see and feel the moment as clearly as if it were yesterday. There I was, carrying two empty pails back to the barn after having emptied the milk into the cream separator at the house—when suddenly, and without warning, the radio station changed from Yankton, South Dakota to "Live from Carnegie Hall, New York City," where the opera Rigoletto was being performed; this information, however, I did not find out until much later. The only thing I knew then was that a voice from heaven was singing "La Donna Mobile." I cannot describe what I felt the first time I heard such music. It was nothing like the music that was usually played locally in rural America. I vibrated sympathetically from head to toe. Interestingly, no one else seemed to be effected, at least no on ever said anything to me, and at the time I didn't say anything to anyone else. It was sort of a private sacred experience within myself.

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Music Touches Me for the First Time

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