IT WAS ONLY A LITTLE TOY GLOCKENSPIEL, but, curiously, it inspired me to do something that I had never contemplated, even in my wildest daydreams, namely, to compose some music. On a scale of one to ten (a Stradivarius being a ten and my father's early nineteenth-century Klotz violin a solid eight), Edgar's toy glockenspiel was a minus one. It wasn't a real glockenspiel; it produced a tinny, clinky-clanky, resonantless sound. But somehow—weirdly—I became drawn to it as my eight-year-old brother kept banging away endlessly at the thing. Our parents had given Edgar the toy for Christmas, and as we sang German carols on Christmas Eve, they tried to get him to play along on the glockenspiel. But this turned out to be a bad idea; between Edgar's wrong notes (he tried, but—well) and his instrument's bad intonation, any reverent feeling for a holy or silent night was pretty much dispelled.

But only a few days later—I remember it was before the New Year—something possessed me, not to play the glockenspiel but to compose for it. I cannot imagine what prompted this odd desire. It is true that right after returning from Germany in early December I had begun to show some interest in music by fooling around on my father's piano. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was fascinated by the strange sounds I was producing haphazardly; they were mostly dissonances, but occasionally I landed by accident on some pure major triad. It wasn't long before my father decided to give me lessons in the hope that I would learn to play the piano properly instead of banging aimlessly around on it—which had begun to annoy him. He started teaching me from a German manual he himself had worked from as a boy. It consisted primarily of elementary finger exercises and scales, and, later, short little pieces in simple fourpart harmonic progressions. It seems that I did rather well and even enjoyed practicing. But I recall that my father sometimes got annoyed at my always wanting to use fingerings other than those prescribed in the manual.