River City
In 1912 (according to the 1957 Broadway production The Music Man) a salesman named Harold Hill (played by Robert Preston) arrived energetically in River City, Iowa to sell musical instruments to the town’s youth. (My own son Adam when 9 years old began to learn the saxophone thanks to just such an itinerant school salesman and remains good at it plus the flute to this day.) But Harold Hill didn’t just sell instruments; he claimed he would leave the town with a fully competent band as well. He was of course a con man and would normally skip town once he sold the instruments.
His pitch was to sell parents the idea that learning to play a horn might be an antidote to a perilous temptation to play pool – a game already accessible in a River City pool hall. And so he declares:
Well, either you’re closing your eyes / . . . Or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated / By the presence of a pool table in your community. // Ya got trouble, my friend, right here, / I say, trouble right here in River City. // An’ the next thing ya know, ‘Your son is playin’ for money / . . . / And list’nin to some big . . . Jasper / . . . tell about horse-race gamblin’. // . . . Are certain words creeping into his conversation? / Words like ‘swell’? ” / And ‘so’s your old man’? ” / Well, if so my friends, / Ya got trouble.
At first the townspeople recoil before this rhythmically speaking, sprightly stranger. But then they are like that with every newcomer – as they admit in the lyrics:
Oh, there’s nothing halfway / About the Iowa way to treat you, / When we treat you / Which we may not do at all. / There’s an Iowa kind of special / Chip-on-the-shoulder attitude . . . / We can be cold / As our falling thermometers in December / And we’re so by God stubborn / We could stand touchin’ noses / For a week at a time / And never see eye-to-eye.
So Harold has a lot to overcome but then again he himself is overcome by Marian the town librarian with whom he falls in love and so nervously but sincerely he does try to conduct the assembled youthful purchasers of his instruments in a rendition of Beethoven’s Minuet in G – a performance so dissonant as to make one cringe. But not the parents! To them it is celestial – and before you know it, what with uniforms as well, the youth parade through town to the score of:
Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun / With a hundred and ten cornets right behind / There were more than a thousand reeds / Springing up like weeds / There were / Clarinets of ev’ry size / And trumpeters who’d improvise / A full octave higher than the score!
I wonder if Meredith Wilson, living and writing his story within two thousand years of Christian culture, was influenced by today’s Gospel in which Jesus comes to Nazareth to work miracles, to relieve people of their Chip-on-the shoulder attitude, to get them, when it comes to caring about each other, to improvise / A full octave higher than the score! The question then arises: would he be any more successful if he were to come to Sonoma?