The repeating comedy I grew up witnessing featured my father cranking up the Victrola one minute, and my mother turning it down, or turning it off, the next. I was always squarely on my father’s side of this dispute: music all day long, filling the house, was a miracle that technology had allowed; why have less?

Dad’s selections were wonderfully ecumenical. Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra much of the time, sometimes Calypso music, but also Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, and a full range of other popular Greek music, plus the occasional classical and jazz selections. Dad had an awful voice, and he was aware of the problem, but he still sang along. I came to understand that making music is about more than the quality of sound; it is also about the joy of sharing it with others.

I grew up mainly playing Greek music. I continue to play the bouzouki and the other related long-necked lutes of Anatolian origin (the clinky, high-pitched, percussive baglama, and the mid-sized dzouras), and recently have begun to learn the oud. I can never get enough of the sounds these instruments make. We lived in Washington, D.C. Not too far away from us, near Baltimore, lived the great bouzouki player, John Tatasopoulos, who agreed to teach me. A lesson took the form of the two of us sitting opposite one another while he played a song and I tried to imitate his playing. He would laugh proudly if I did anything remotely interesting improvisationally. No sheet music, no chord outlines, just two people playing instruments together in a room. Then my father would drive me home and I’d jump out of the car and run inside to try to remember what I had just learned. I never forgot. The ephemeral quality of the lessons made them precious. Around the same time I took two years of music theory and composition in high school from tenor Ralph Williams, and somehow the two volumes of Elie Siegmeister’s Harmony and Melody stayed in my head, undoubtedly because of the way Ralph brought them to life. I was not aware at the time that Siegmeister was known in part for his interest in bridging the worlds of classical and folk music, but I imagine that likely added to the appeal his books had for me.