Where There's a Whistle


I'm pretty sure my ability to write music comes from my dad. I have no other musical blood ancestors to blame.  

Dad couldn't read a note of music or play an instrument (he washed out on the trumpet in elementary school), but he had a good ear and he could carry a tune. 

Best of all? He could whistle like nobody's business. His technique was astonishing, as nimble as a chimpanzee. And he could improvise for hours. He would putter around the house, spinning endlessly inventive, wildly acrobatic variations on the simplest of tunes.

One of Dad's favorite songs from his own childhood was "Dunderbeck's Machine." It used a familiar folk melody to tell the story of an evil butcher whose sausage production flowed in suspicious concord with the disappearances of animals from the nearby pound: 

Dunderbeck, oh, Dunderbeck!
How could you be so mean?
I'll bet that you are sorry
You invented that machine.
Now dogs and cats and long-tailed rats
No longer may be seen:
They're all ground up to sausage meat
In Dunderbeck's machine.

Dad loved this song so much he even wrote his own set of verses to it, one of which contained a delightfully awful pun about a man who, realizing his own dog was missing, "suspected Dunderbeck and truly feared the wurst."

(So in addition to the musical thing, I also got Dad's love of puns and a fondness for silly verse.)

Ever since Dad died, I've been doodling on a set of variations on the melody to "Dunderbeck's Machine." (You may know the tune by some other name. You may also know it by a different melody altogether, which I have learned in recent years is probably a more common one for these words.)

I work on this piece not out of an urgent need to finish and share it, though I'm sure I will someday. I don't try to tell the Dunderbeck story or depict any particular images from it. I just try to capture something of my dad's natural gift for musical whimsy. 









Mostly I do it as a way to hang out with him. 

 I'd give anything if, just once, I could compare my efforts to the source and hear him whistle the tune himself again. 


George Lee Thurston III 
Oct. 1, 1925-March 20, 2001 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tips for the Creatively Constipated

Like anyone else who makes stuff up for a living, music arrangers occasionally suffer from creative constipation – sometimes to the point that we are so unsure of our ability to put a new spin on a tune and write it to our impossibly high standards that we back out of doing it. Then we hear the arrangement that’s used in its place, and we realize we could have farted out a better one after a dinner of corned beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee. So my advice to the creatively blocked – no matter what your art may be – is always: Go have that dinner. Then write. Write whatever is in your head at the moment, even just the melody and chord symbols. Bland is better than nothing, for now. It can be merely the least inspired thing you've ever written … or you can make it intentionally bad . Ask yourself what Mr. Trololo would do. Let it be shabby and cheesy and gauche. Or maybe just a little over-caffeinated . Write it as a jaunty march in 6/8 time, or as...
Read more

Oh, Say, Can You Boom-Crash

September 5, 2016  Weather permitting, my beloved Florida State University Marching Chiefs will rehearse this afternoon at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando before heading to Generic Corporate Overlord Stadium for the Seminoles' season opener against Ole Miss at 8 pm.  My first band directing job out of FSU was at Oak Ridge. And our band’s first performance, on September 11, 1987, was one for the ages, thanks to my intrepid students and their unflappable drum major, Amy Booth—and a pants-wettingly fabulous cameo from Mother Nature. Oak Ridge opened its football season at home against Dr. Phillips High School, which had just opened its doors and was instantly Oak Ridge’s biggest rival, since many former ORHS Pioneers were now newly minted DPHS Panthers. The skies had been overcast all day, but the rain had held off … until the Pioneer Marching Band took the field for pregame. Just as Amy started the National Anthem, the rain came. By the second line, “Whose ...
Read more

Those Noisy, Pesky, Horny Cicadas

Image
May 2013  I’m sitting in my sunroom on a warm afternoon, looking out across my newly green backyard and the ravine that cuts through our neighborhood. I’m awaiting, with a creeping sense of dread and resignation, a benign but loud invasion.  The 17-year periodical cicadas (Brood II) are due to crawl up from underground around these parts, as soon as the ground temperature hits and maintains 64 degrees.  Soon.  A few precocious cicadas emerged in the past couple of summers, much to the evil delight of our cats, who regarded them as toys to be brought inside and batted about.  I know many people look forward to the cicadas. And I know they’re essentially harmless. ( Even delicious , some say.)  I certainly don’t regard them the same way I regard, say, roaches or spiders or ants.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  Cicadas are often mistakenly called  locusts   –  but really, they’re not even c...
Read more