Bells, Blasts and Whistles

Every so often my wife, Cinelli, pumps me full of culture by taking me to the kinds of musical performances I struggle to avoid. I suffer fugues poorly and don’t know a barcarole from a barbell . . . but this time she mentioned Ojai.

It is a sweet little town for white people set among oak and sycamore trees in western Ventura County, about as far from L.A. as one can hide and still feel the city’s nagging presence.

There is an overriding sense of serenity in Ojai that attracts those of us who otherwise spend our lives shouting obscenities out of car windows at other drivers on the Hollywood Freeway. We need peace and quiet.

Well, I almost had it.

By seducing me with Ojai’s storied tranquillity, she got me to attend its weekend music festival. Even that held an element of attraction. Like a sailor lured to disaster by naked, harp-strumming sirens on a rocky shoreline, I respond to music in limited forms.

“You like to hum,” Cinelli said in her effort to convince me. “You hum all the time, no matter what. Just think of this as two days of humming, accompanied by the New World Symphony Orchestra.”

“I normally don’t hum arias from ‘Die Fledermaus,’ ” I said.

“Not to worry, that’s not in the program. Maybe they’ll have music you can understand. Like ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe’ or the theme from ‘Cheers.’ ”

So off we drove, humming and cursing, northward from the dreaded L.A., toward a snippet of heaven called (say it pianissimo) . . . Ojai.

*

Let me tell you right off that our music critic, Martin Bernheimer, writes calmly and knowledgeably of the performances elsewhere in the paper, so if you want real information, turn quickly to his work before it’s too late. I write, well, impressions.

My impression of the, God help us, “new American music” presented in tree-shaded Libbey Park, for instance, is that it was written expressly for people from L.A. who cannot exist without a daily intake of chaos.

The condition is known in psychiatric circles as the Bell and Whistle Syndrome and is found only among those who have lived more than 10 years amid the filth and calamity of a big city.

Since most of the 5,000 music lovers who come to the festival every spring are from L.A., it is only natural that part of the program be tailored specifically for us. To employ a musical term, we bring in the do-re-mi.

No, they don’t litter the park with empty beer cans or fire Uzis over our heads to make us feel at home, but they do give us noise in the form of music, or music in the form of noise, depending on how you look at it.

Take the piece called “Phorion, From Baroque Variations” by Lukas Foss. Festival director Joan Kemper told me earlier that people come to Ojai seeking a return to memories of simpler times, when you could go to a park, sit on the lawn and listen to music.

“Phorion” was more like a memory of D-day, with bells and whistles and drums and whizzy toys and horns blasting hellfire into the sky. Even the sirens of passing fire engines fit perfectly into the tuneless cacophony.

“People are clapping,” Cinelli said in its defense. “They loved it.”

“People clap at suicides from tall buildings,” I said. “They love that too.”

*

I’m no expert on new music, so a lot of what I heard at Ojai was probably over my head, like these lyrics from an aria called “The Love of My Life”:

“The love of my life is just five monosyllables/Ticking my minutes, striking my hours:/Ding dong damn die tit come bell go wait reach touch lose . . . “

“What the hell does that mean?” I whispered to Cinelli during the performance.

“Just what it says,” she whispered back.

“It means ‘Ding dong damn die tit come bell go?’ ”

“Just sit quietly and play with your crayons. It’ll be over soon and I’ll take you to see ‘The Flintstones.’ ”

She didn’t take me to a movie, but she did take me to a bar across the street called the Hub, where I had me a Budweiser beer and shot a little snooker with a guy who said “yabba-dabba-doo” when he rammed the four-ball into a corner pocket.

Two days of culture may be too much for me. I love Ojai, and some of the quieter pieces did indeed damp the fires of negativity burning in my mottled old soul. Like the music of Paula Robison’s flute spun like gold among the trees on a starry night.

But I was glad to get back to L.A., too. Having someone honk at me and give me the finger makes me feel at home. At least I know what they mean.