My parents, Charles and Anna Mann, met in Portland, Oregon. My father was born in England where his family worked in the garment industry, and following his time in the British army in World War I, he moved to Oregon. At five years of age, my mother and her family arrived there from Poland. I was their first child and we stayed in Portland until I was close to eleven. My brother, Alfred, was born five years after my birth and my sister, Rosalind, eight years later. During this time my father had a tailor shop in Portland. He was a good tailor.
My parents were not trained as musicians. Following high school, my mother got a job with a man who sold pianos. An upright piano was included in her pay. She learned to play and she loved to sing. She had a beautiful singing voice and sang in the Portland Symphony Chorus. When she came to New York, she sang in the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chorus and later in the YMHA Chorus. My father didn’t play any instrument but he loved classical music.
It was important to my parents that their children play musical instruments. As the oldest (at 9 years of age) I was told that I must choose a musical instrument to study. They didn’t specify which instrument. We had an upright piano in my house, but I selected the violin. I don’t know why. I believe because it was smaller than the piano and I could carry it. Alfred tried the piano, oboe, and cello, and ended up not playing an instrument—he became a scientist instead. Rosalind started piano, and played successfully.
I started my music lessons at the Portland College of Music, after my parents saw an advertisement in the Portland daily paper: “Portland College of Music, Instrument provided, inexpensive weekly lessons.” Every Saturday, for $2, I was sent across the Willamette River to the Holiday School where they had a class of six girls and me, Robert Mann. I was loaned a cheaply made violin for free. I attended all of these classes for my parents. The teacher was more interested in the young girls’ playing so I was never called on to demonstrate my ability, which was good because I never practiced. My mother would ask, “Why aren’t you practicing violin?” I would say, “Mom, I’m learning to read music.” I would show her the music, and had tucked my favorite science fiction story inside the music book, which I would read instead. I don’t know if I even learned to draw a bow at that time. After six months, I was informed of my “graduation” and handed the violin, bow, and violin case.
When I was ten and a half, my friends and I had a gang headquarters that was a construction ditch. It was very deep with planks overhead and we could get down below. The day I got my violin, I went directly to my underground club where my friends were. I showed my gang my bow and violin. We decided that we all should have instruments. We collected broom handles, three cigar boxes, a few pieces of wood, and nails. I stripped my violin of three of its strings. I attached one string to each of the cigar boxes. We even stripped the hair on the bow to put on three other hickory sticks so they could make a sound. Without any knowledge or understanding, I created my first string quartet and had a great time. I just wanted to play music in a group. I brought all the cigar boxes home, along with my violin. When my parents discovered what I had done, I learned that chamber music is very pleasant up front and very painful behind.
My father decided to start a new tailor business in Tillamook, a town of around 900 people near the coast of Oregon, where we lived for two and a half years. Tillamook, named after an Indian tribe, is where I have my most vivid, early memories and where I discovered earthly paradise.
I remember my father met an elderly Norwegian furniture maker who lived in Tillamook. This man’s hobby was his passion for building crude violins out of fresh maple wood. He didn’t know how to make a good violin, but what he made looked like a violin and sounded a little bit like a violin. My father made a suit of clothes for this old man and in exchange, my father received a violin. And that is how I got the first violin that was really mine.
In Tillamook I began to learn what it was like to play for other people. We were the only Jewish family in the town and there were about nine churches. There was one congregation on Saturday, the Seventh Day Adventists, and there were Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, and all kinds of denominations on Sunday. I became very popular in Tillamook, going to all of these churches. When it was time to pass the hat for the offertory, I’d play some piece of music on my violin. They loved to have me play rather than a little old organ or piano.
After about a year of living in Tillamook, someone new arrived in the town. His name was Mr. Bergeron, from Belgium. He came to town to grow tulips. Bergeron also played the violin and claimed that he had studied with the great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull. My father decided that I should take violin lessons from Mr. Bergeron. He was a disaster and didn’t teach me anything. However, he did do one thing that I loved. He would take me fishing, to my delight.
He loved to fish as much as I did. He had a small, leaky boat, and he rented a dock space close to Tillamook Bay.
One night, after a night of cards and carousing, the dock owner and Mr. Bergeron drunkenly argued over the amount of dock rental. My teacher was short, stocky, and strong. He threatened to beat up his friend, who actually asked his wife to retrieve his shotgun. She did. He fired. Mr. Bergeron and his wooden box of a boat seemed surprisingly lifelike to a young boy who had never seen a dead man before.
The Tillamook Press printed, “No Violin Teacher in Our Town.” Without hesitation and surprisingly little resistance from my parents, I immediately reenlisted in nature’s conservatory. Paradise, for me, restored. My passion was fishing. I loved to go through the wetlands of Oregon because there was a lot of rain. Tillamook was bounded on each side by two very good fishing streams, the Trask River and the Tillamook River. I would take a pail of dirt and worms and very minor fishing equipment. I would fish during the day while my parents were working in their tailor shop and make sure that I was home before they got home. They would ask if I had practiced, and of course I was a good liar. As a child I didn’t have a fiery feeling for music, not at all.
Tillamook is where I discovered my love of nature. I caged a pet porcupine, slept on the ground in the wild, and listened to the whimpering night cries of mountain lions in the distance. I also loved hiking. The mountains on the coast of Oregon are not precipitous, but they are pretty high and remarkable. No coast could be more beautiful. I loved climbing cliffs. I took chances all the time. On the Pacific coast a few miles west of town, there was a dramatic confluence of jagged, granite cliffs, hundreds of feet in the air, precipitously dropping down into small, deep indenting sea bays overflowing with gritty sands beneath carpets of sea-smelling seaweeds, barnacle-encrusted rocks, shells of living and dying miniature sea animals, all depending on the back and forth path of monthly charted tides. This scene in daylight was crowded with large orchestras of seabird harmonies clamoring a cappella. At night it became rushed crescendos and decrescendos of an ageless repetition of waves. In this dramatic geographical mix was a reminder of sadness called the Lost Boys Cave. Two young boys had entered at low tide and were trapped by the incoming tidal waters, deep under the mountainous cliff. By accident I discovered this place of magical power.
One misty, wet afternoon, I clambered over a rocky cliff unsuspecting of the cave beneath. The view from the summit was obscured by the drizzling rain, but the percussive roar of mighty waves drew me down a most slippery descent. I succeeded because I was young and agile. I found a thin ledge thirty feet above a violent, unending attack of powerful cascading waves. What a discovery! The waves that would hit this cliff were fantastic. They were mountains of waves. While the waves sprayed over me, they never threatened to dislodge me into the roaring water. There is something ego fulfilling about being able to get along in the wilderness by yourself. I would perch on the ledge above and listen to the waves and their rhythm. I believe one of the reasons why I have such fantastic rhythm is because I was so fascinated by watching these waves. I would spend an entire day there when I wasn’t in school, sitting on the ledge by myself, just watching the waves.
Once I had discovered the cliffs, I would spend hours silently responding to the rhythmic cycle of lesser to greater waves building into an orgiastic climax as they hit and surged over the rocky crest into the pond. The musical elements of this early experience have provided unending resources throughout my musical journey. Another fascination of mine was watching meteor showers. I would sleep outdoors and watch the meteors cross the sky. It was fascinating to see the variance of the large ones that didn’t go that far, and the little ones that went farther.
Pardon Ludwig (van Beethoven), for my daring to mention that my first concerts were composed of Pastoral Symphonies consisting of the subtle melodies of pastured cows modulating inharmonically into milk cans, tonally resolving into long, slanted vats of Tillamook cheese. What better environment to develop a keen ear, a sharp eye for alert response in future existing chamber music teamwork. Every round trip of the sun, every change of season added a new dimension to my unborn musical vocabulary. New variations constantly stirred my imagination with every furious storm. With all the senses brought to life in a very young body, I think Tillamook’s conservatory that I attended before the age of thirteen was the best.