Music of Ezra Laderman, Vol. 1

Ezra Laderman writes: "The world I grew up in living in Brooklyn, always close to Ebbets Field and the Children's Museum, consisted of all those things kids did as first generation Americans. To that heady mix there was, as well, music. My parents, Isidor and Leah, were born in Galicia, Poland; came to the United States early in the 20th century, met, married, settled in Brooklyn, and when I arrived June 29, 1924, there was an upright Worthington piano in the apartment and my brother Jack practiced on it daily. When my younger brother Gabriel arrived in 1929, I was already deeply involved in music. When I was three I heard my first children's concert at Carnegie Hall led by the debonair Ernest Schelling. During the height of the depression I used to sit next to the fountain of the Sculpture Court at the Brooklyn Museum while the WPA Orchestra performed. On Saturday nights I would occupy an empty box overlooking the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as some musicians from the pit Orchestra ate sandwiches and drank Chianti as the Salmaggi Opera Company performed Italian repertoire. On Friday afternoons at school we would hear Walter Damrosch take us on musical journeys over the airwaves. When we finally got our Atwater Kent radio, Sunday afternoons belonged to the New York Philharmonic (What a difference between children growing up then and children growing up now! Is it any wonder our classical music is in such trouble today?) One day when I was six, I was brought to the Brooklyn Community Music School, just down the street from BAM and suddenly my musical education in the guise of the Dalcrosse method began. This musical world competed with growing up a city boy, never knowing how desperately poor we were, going (on scholarship) to the Ethical Culture School, where learning Greek history was essential, moving, one step ahead of the landlord, to seven apartments the first decade of my life, and having the extraordinary sense that everything was possible. At four, I was improvising at the piano; at seven, I began to compose music, writing it down. I hardly knew it then, but I had at a very early age made a giant step to becoming a composer."