My Dad’s Unfinished Melody
My dad was an amazing musician, playing piano and organ proficiently, singing beautifully. Sadly, his depression and negative self-image never really let him enjoy his talents or achievements.
His first master’s degree was in music history, so he understood the way music is created within a time and place, the way its creator is influenced by those who came before as composers both emulate and resist past models.
He taught me much of what I know about music, including how to play the piano and organ. I never became the musician he was—that wasn’t my primary passion—but I learned well and do just fine.
In his belongings after my dad died, I found folders and files of music he had begun to compose, almost none of which did he ever finish. I wrote about that experience in my memoir. I thought I’d dealt with that experience, learned all I could from those discoveries.
A scrapbooked newspaper article about my dad’s musical successes during college at St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN
Just recently, while helping my mom go through a box of her childhood memories, I discovered a blue folder with more of my dad’s music. I probably found it after he died. In fairness, my mom’s and dad’s memory boxes were never well organized and I may have left some tumbled together because they fit well enough or I got distracted or it didn’t really matter. How many of us have boxes of jumbled-together mementoes from our past that we assume we’ll have time to go through someday?
On this day, I took the handwritten and computer-printed scores over to my mom’s piano, the one my dad played in our homes in Granite Falls, MN, in Winona, MN, and in the home he shared with only my mom in Waite Park, MN. We moved the piano a fourth time to my mom’s new house in Michigan, just five minutes from where I live in Marinette, WI, a little over six years ago.
One of the handwritten scores I recognized immediately: he had later put it into a computer program, “finished” it, and shared it with me to play. Another one has measures scribbled out towards the end, and while it appears to be written for piano and not organ, I struggle to think of how I would play all those notes that quickly without using the pedals to help.
One other piece, written for organ and printed from a computer program he owned later in life, is titled “Piece Modern.” I stumble through it, not understanding it until I notice that both the right and left hand are in the treble clef. It doesn’t really work on piano then because the hands overlap. The beautiful part about the organ is that you have more than one keyboard and each one can produce a multitude of different sounds. For now, I take the left hand down an octave to hear the chords he created, getting a sense of the rhythms. Yes, it definitely feels modern, hard to connect with emotionally right away. Still, there is a melody or a pattern that intrigues me.
And then it ends. Like so many of the pieces my dad composed, he didn’t finish it, if creative pieces can ever truly be finished.
In the same folder I find an autographed copy of a piece by the organist and teacher Gerald Bales entitled “Your Tears,” words by Edwin Markham, music by Gerald Bales. It’s signed on the front page, “With best regards, ‘Jim D,’ Gerald.” At the very end, in the ink of the original, is “Gerald Bales April/45.”
I know from conversations with my dad that he was proud to have been a student of Gerald Bales for a time in the 1960s. My dad kept other memories of him, programs and articles.
I know my dad’s depression meant he compared himself to people like Bales, found himself lesser, and sunk deeper into sadness as a result. I watched it happen too often.
The day I found this folder of my dad’s music and the piece by Bales, I had been thinking about my own creativity. Like all writers and creative individuals in general, I worry about whether I should put my work out there. Each blog I post, I wonder if instead it should join the others that sit in folders digitally or on paper, or be put in a box perhaps. Like my dad I have so many unfinished pieces.
Unlike him, lately I am daring to say that some are finished enough to be out in the world, to be experienced by others. As my dad did, I compare myself to others and find myself to be lesser. Unlike him, probably because of years of counseling and medication, because of strong people in my life who know me well, because of my awareness of the spiral, I speak up when I feel that total unworthiness, or I write it out, and then I am able to share my creative work.
In moments like these, it is easier for me to feel empathy for my dad. I don’t always. That same day at my mom’s, I found in the same box of her things a letter I had written to her during the four years my sister and I were estranged from my parents. I talk in the letter about what life was like with my dad—his belittling of all of us, his swings of anger, how his depression wreaked its toll on my mom, my sister, and on me. Empathy escapes me in those moments.
But I carried home that folder with his music. I open it now. I imagine his sadness as he looks at what his teacher accomplished. I imagine how his creativity was sparked and he began to compose, how either with time the creative spark faded or perhaps he compared himself too much. Perhaps he worried too much about whether his compositions were good enough, whatever that means.
I decide not to leave my works unfinished, unpublished. In so doing, part of me believes I honor my dad’s creative spirit—I honor him. I know he would not be pleased with me that I speak of him so openly here and in my memoir. But my sister reminded me recently that honoring our parents doesn’t mean we can’t tell the truth about them. Maybe if I tell my truths about my dad, if I release my own creative works to the world, I can honor his spirit, his desire to create, his desire to be remembered. Since I can’t finish the music he started, perhaps I can finish something of my own, call it good enough, and honor what I think he wanted to do by putting it out in the world.