red hot bottle rockets

It starts off with a beautiful church hymn, giving no indication of the fury to come. In high school, I was four seats away from being part of that quartet, and though by the time we played the piece I had all but given up the quest for first chair, I wanted to play that elegy. The English horn breaks the reverie, the orchestra picks up and it begins, really begins.

Tchaikovsky, or Chaikovsky if you're PC, hated the piece because it was too noisy – ahead of its time in picking up on Russolo's fascination of the musical war machine. My orchestra used digital cannon fire triggered by a midi-keyboard, and I'll never forget the saddened face of the bass drum player when he was relieved of his duties with the big beater. Public castration is never pretty.

In Wildwood, the city I'm writing a book about, everyone says, "On Memorial Day I'm happy to see them come, and by Labor Day all I want is for everyone to go home." Some things are best if only had for a short while, and I can only hear 1812 now on one day. This one.

Funny to me is that the Boston Pops started playing this battle ax to pick up attendance in 1929, and 75 years later there's nary a fireworks display without this ode to the class of titans, the clash best illustrated to me in Woody Allen's pre-Annie Hall Keaton sidesplitter, Love and Death. Big, bulky, full of 'earthy peasant dances' as was the vogue at the time, and gargantuan melodies belched from the military corps while bells clang and the orchestra saws along, it typifies that so called populist turn in classical programming that the Pops was created to serve. Give them the whistles, then woo them with Mozart. Ahh, how the mighty err without change.

The 1812 Overture was a staple at my family's parties, if only because my grandfather refused to ever come onto the back porch to watch the festivities because HE was watching them broadcast from Boston. "Look at all the boats," he'd say as we walked out of the kitchen, past him, and out the sliding door to the patio. His t.v. was like eight feet wide and its image was made by red, green and blue separations projected on a mirror then cast to the screen. It was gigantic, and the sound was gigantic like when he'd play Amazing Grace on the stereo and the whole place, every nook and cranny, would get filled with bagpipe. Simply inescapable yet stationary, much like him.

The battle analogy, played out in the Marseillaise and Russian national anthems, has a somewhat facile connection to the movement of the piece, woven throughout with a few modulated phrases repeated for tension, but really a lot of the piece is floating, hinting at triumph. These parts are hard to choreograph with the simple oom-pah of fireworks, which are really in 3/4 if you consider the launch load, often in the silvery cracklers seen as a white streak, as a one, the burst as two and the report and fade as three. It would be a slow three, and the retardando would be clipped by the one of some other waltz.

My new love fears fireworks, and I wonder why, but think that a lot of people may feel the same. Perhaps that's why they come so close on the tail of one another, because given time to contemplate the one as an isolated incident, a full event, it would seem like nothing but a horrible time-lapse image of decay. This supposes you believe, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, that our lives have only one arcing moment, and indeed, many do. At least with fireworks, everyone agrees what moment that is – and it is beautiful for everyone on all sides. Maybe the cataclysm, the public display, the wastefulness and bravado make some uncomfortable too – it is a function of the military after all.

Still, I love smelling the powder as it hangs under the clouds and hearing a crowd left fourth oohs to something so simple yet infrequent that it counts as our only public moment of mutual suspended admiration in an otherwise frenzied and unnoticed year. Here we stand, together watching the fireworks, listening to the sounds of war triumph long faded, a little fearful of death and hoping for a long time before the finale. At least during that part, with all the clamor, I'd be playing along too.


Today I'm in Seattle and will be spending the fourth with my good friend Tanky, who attended quite of few of those rousing occasions back in Ohio – many of which are legendary among my friends. I've lived to tell the tale of my dad's foray into illegal, silent fuse mortar shells and punked quite a few big ones into the night sky to the discomfort of my mom and the envy of competing neighbors. This is the day I miss my family the most, and wish for the time when we all lived close and could hold it together enough to eat hot dogs and have fun without sickness, anger or distance getting in the way.