A boy hides from his piano teacher to avoid playing scales, and years later he tells parents how glad he is to have learned music as a child. Max Reif's "Music History" lets those two facts sit side by side and never quite reconciles them. On the surface it is a modest childhood memoir. Underneath, it asks what a lesson is worth when almost nothing you were taught seems to survive.
The poem is built from small, sharply chosen sensory details. Mrs. Aranda "smelled so good," and later the boy "pined for her perfume / and pretty face." Her house has "a giant blue vase / on the stone front porch," which he passes on walks, as if lingering near it were a way of lingering near her. Then come the hints of a story the child can't read: her "tall dark son, / who had a different last name / and wore black / leather jackets." The speaker doesn't explain or judge. He reports what a child would notice, and the gaps feel true to how a child sees adults. The short, broken lines add to this, since each fragment arrives like a snapshot.
Miss Gilbert, who replaces Mrs. Aranda, is drawn in sharp contrast. She is "doughty, rouge-faced," her duplex "drab," and the lesson hour is a chore of "half an hour each." The most striking image in the poem is the unseen figure who "shuffled in the next room, / hidden by a green curtain." We never learn who it is. The curtain makes the lessons faintly eerie and cut off, the opposite of the warm, perfumed afternoons at home. The detail also gives the poem a note of mystery that has nothing to do with music.
Reif writes in free verse with no rhyme scheme, and the plain, conversational diction keeps the poem close to speech. Its wordplay is quiet but deliberate. "Stardust" is the one piece that stays "in my fingers today," while the grander repertoire has "turned / to memory dust." The same syllable ends both phrases, so the song's title seems to predict the fate of everything else. The speaker also says he learned the song "by heart." Judging by the poem's emotional pull toward Mrs. Aranda, that phrase may carry more than its usual meaning, though the speaker himself admits it happens "for some mysterious reason." Lineation helps with the forgetting too. The list of Chopin and Tchaikovsky breaks "The Poor / People of Paris" across two lines, as though the titles were already coming apart on the page.
Humor keeps the poem from turning sentimental. The boy "requested popular songs" and, given "Theme from My Three Sons," played it "shameless but bored." Even the quarrel with Mrs. Aranda ends diplomatically: "We fought to a draw." Then the parents surrender, and the speaker is "free / to roam baseball fields / until the sun went down." The sentence about freedom is the warmest and most energetic in the poem, and it has nothing to do with music.
That is why the ending lands so well. The adult speaker says he is happy he learned "music fundamentals," and then adds, "And the funny thing is, / it's true." The two short final lines are flat, almost deadpan. The poem doesn't say why it is true, and the question stays with the reader. One reading, which is an inference rather than something stated, is that fundamentals work invisibly. They leave no repertoire behind, only an ability to teach, to listen, perhaps to write a poem named for music.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty. Reif refuses the tidy moral that childhood suffering pays off, and he also refuses to dismiss the lessons as wasted. He shows that a hated chore, a perfumed teacher, a green curtain and one old song can all be real parts of an education, even when the person looking back can't say exactly what remains.