Math and mystery

You never give me your money
You only give me your funny paper
And in the middle of negotiation
You break down

I never give you my number
I only give you my situation
And in the middle of investigation
I break down
–Lennon & McCartney

“You Never Give Me Your Money.” The first song I learned to play competently on the piano, the intro part anyway. I still love those hypnotic chords, the A minor 7 dropping to the F major 7 – F6 combo before a temporary resolution with the skip-dancing G7 – C exchange. And McCartney’s vocal — forget the attribution, this is purely Paul – is simply killer; listen how he makes a sad song sound cool.

I figured out “You Never Give Me Your Money” by ear on a Baldwin upright in one of the practice rooms at Garden City High School, about 5 years after the release of “Abbey Road.” (For those too young or too old to fix that in time, it was about 1974.) Guitar was and is my main instrument; but in high school I started playing around with the keyboard, largely because of a man I considered one of the coolest cats on earth.

Dr. Diehl was my music theory teacher. He didn’t cut much of a figure, what with his short stature, horn-rimmed glasses and slicked-back thinning hair. He also had to be one of the last public school teachers to work regularly in a jacket and tie. Not exactly someone you’d think would inspire a classroom full of guys with shoulder-length hair, short attention spans and raging hormones for the gals in their peasant blouses and bell-bottomed jeans.

But inspire us he did. His unabashed musicality was downright contagious. Dr. Diehl helped us make sense of music, explaining the math and structure behind the sound; but what set him apart from other music teachers was that he did it in a way that preserved the mystery of the art form. Every day with Dr. Diehl was a lesson in, I can show you why a song or piece of classical music makes sense, but I can’t predict how you’ll respond to it. That you need to discover for yourself. Isn’t that amazing?

After 3 classes with Dr. Diehl you were bringing in your favorite records for him to play and explain and he would listen attentively, sometimes running over to the piano to repeat a phrase he’d just heard to illustrate a point in the day’s lesson. On performance days he was always fired up to hear what we’d be playing. I composed and performed my first piece of music for his class, a phrygian mode in E minor for guitar that I still play sometimes.

On the keyboard, I never came close to developing the chops of even a Nat King Cole wannabe. Sometimes I would, however — especially on days in the practice room when “You Never Give Me Your Money” rang out just the way I wanted it to — draw faces of the curious to the little window on the door to my teenaged bliss.

Isn’t that amazing?