It was one of those exhilarating August mornings as we made our way east on 27, our windows open, the traffic as slow and well-mannered as a bagel-hopeful line at Goldberg’s, the ample sun and ampler blueness of sky enough to cheer us along, a sky that “goes from dawn to blue” in the phrase from James Schuyler’s 1974 poem written while on holiday in Water Mill.
Then the wailing began. The driver in the car next to us had his windows down too and, unlike us, his car radio loudly and affirmatively on. Wagner wafted westward in the wind, Brunnhilde the carrier of his song. The frightened pigeon nestling on our windshield scurried away as she sent ravens to their fiery doom. As for us, we waited with resignation for the soporific soprano to round off her soaring screech. She did; the fat lady had sung.
And then came the voice we knew and loved so well, giving exultation to that song, allowing us to forget and to forgive its melancholy melodies and to take immediate advantage of the sudden acceleration in traffic, almost as if that had been ordained by his ever-cheerful tone. We had been moving forward inch by resigned inch; we were now resolutely on our way. His voice continued to be heard, still mellifluous in the background. I knew whose it was and memories jostled with each other on that harried highway.
“In the background.” Where has that phrase gone? Is anything “in the background” today? We listen to podcasts, we engage with Instagram, we choose the conversations we wish to follow on Facebook, we deliberate on what we want to watch on television, we apportion measured time each day to keep pace with its plodding plot. We tell Alexa what to play.
Growing up in Delhi University, life, especially “Western classical music life,” was as deliberate as much is today. All India Radio had four hours for it each week: “Concert Hour” on Sundays, chamber music on Tuesdays, operatic selections on Thursdays. And “Listeners’ Choice” on Wednesdays. A group of us gathered on the dusk-laden lawns each week to tune into it, wondering on what intriguing adventure we would be led by the host of the program who never announced her name and whose name no one knew. Rumor had it her first name was Mohini, and Mysterious Mohini ruled those midweek evenings.
Part of our excitement was the wonder of expectation — would our own requests, mailed to the program on neatly written postcards, be played? Mysterious Mohini tried to be equitable; if there was a request played from “a listener in Delhi University” (which was in north Delhi), she would make the effort to go east, south, or west for the next ones. Some of us wrote with false addresses so that we were not competing with all those at our own, but she seemed to have a sixth sense and few of those found airtime. She also clearly had a sense of humor; one of us addressed our card to “Mysterious Mohini” and his request led the hour the very next week.
In any case that was how my interest in and affection for Western classical music was nurtured; on my first assignment in New York, there were wonderful choices for that genre on FM radio, which I had on constantly (yes, “in the background”). But I never really bonded with the announcers (or comperes, as we called them in India) in the manner, say, I did with Cousin Brucie and 101.1 FM.
Then came 1999. I was at work (where the classical music station WQXR was always on, softly and ITB) when I heard a new voice, a voice as unfamiliar as it was beautiful, an adjective unusual for a voice, but the one that comes immediately to mind and fails to dislodge. All that afternoon and in the afternoons ahead I listened to that voice as he introduced music I loved and music I had not heard. And it was a voice with a whole dramatis personae of its own, warm and comforting as a hot cup of cocoa on a winter night at one point, low and mysterious, like the soughing of wind in the trees, at another. And I found a name. Jeff Spurgeon.
Jeff and I have been together close to 30 years. We have never met. We have never even corresponded. But those afternoons, and later the mornings when he was the voice I woke up to, made him a part of life, much as Mysterious Mohini was a half-century ago. An easier part of life to access and cherish, though. I no longer needed a clunky transistor to tune to 105.9, the WQXR app brought him to me wherever I was and Bluetooth allowed him on the bandwidth of our car — and, indeed, access to all of Suffolk County, once far beyond its edge.
Jeff once said his favorite orchestral piece was Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe.” Listening to it always brings goosebumps in its “Lever du jour” segment, the soft chorus of single-syllabled voices brightening the morning sun. As Jeff did until earlier this month, when, as he said in a recent interview, he will be free to wander the sights of New York by the roads in front of him rather than through the glass window of his studio.
Stay happy, Jeff!
Ramu Damodaran was the first chief of the United Nations Academic Impact initiative and a TV news anchor and radio disc jockey in India. He lives in Springs.