Musical Interludes
I lay in bed fighting the heaviness of sleep while listening to the delicate notes of a Chopin piano concerto gently winding up the narrow stairwell from the living room. My father’s piano performances were a nightly ritual when I was growing up, a way for him to unwind from the stresses of college professor life. I was brought up on the richness of classical music. If not emanating from the piano, it was playing on the stereo—the Berliner Philharmoniker playing the Tragic Overture of Brahms Third Symphony or Beethoven’s towering Symphony No. 7 played by the New York Philharmonic (conducted by my dad’s Harvard classmate Leonard Bernstein.) It was a given, then, that when I was old enough, I would start piano lessons and choose a band instrument at school. Many of us witness similarities in interests, in aptitudes, and in professions among siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles—those similarities become even more profound when we look two or three generations back and see a reflectio...
