As a boy, I spent my Independence Days having glorious adventures with my mother and father. My father — the purest lover of liberty — is a walking encyclopedia of the Constitution, having committed much of it to memory. He always made sure that Independence Days were chock-full of historical recitations, readings from the Founders, fireworks, and music that represented the best of Americana.

As native Bostonians, both he and my mother had a penchant for the Boston Pops, whose magnificent master, Maestro Arthur Fiedler, brought it to global fame over the course of his fifty-year career as conductor with the orchestra. Incredibly, Mr. Fielder conducted the Pops for five seasons longer than all of his seventeen predecessors combined. He was known as a man of great warmth and originality, but his greatest legacy was his ability to popularize and make classical music accessible to the common man.

It was on the lawn of Boston’s great Esplanade, listening to the Pops, that my family and I enjoyed our most memorable Independence Days, including Fiedler’s fiftieth anniversary concert on July 4, 1978. Two years earlier, he had set the mark for the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest single audience for a classical music concert. On that occasion, more than 400,000 were in attendance on the Bicentennial.

There were many great Independence Days. Especially memorable to me was spending the Bicentennial with my parents in the Capitol. I was only eleven. (That great day merits a blog of its own.) A decade later, we returned to the Capitol to watch the fireworks from the top of the Department of Interior with then-Secretary Ed Watt. On another occasion, we watched fireworks under the stars by the Iwo Jima Memorial.

Apart from the Bicentennial, the most notable Fourth of July experiences will always be our journeys to Boston to sit on the Esplanade and rejoice with hundreds of thousands to the brilliance of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. There will never be music like that again. Never. Fiedler gave us the national tradition of playing the “1812 Overture” on the Fourth of July to the rousing conclusion of howitzers firing and church bells ringing throughout the city. We lived for those howitzers. It was worth the nine-hour wait and fierce jockeying for position on the lawn in front of the Esplanade — just to hear the brilliant melodic streams of Tchaikovsky accented by the incessant pounding of those cannons at the conclusion of the overture.

Fiedler was the mentor and musical father to composer/conductor John Williams who began at the Pops and went on to become the most famous composer of film soundtracks in history, being nominated for more than thirty Oscars in his career, and receiving five.

Before signing off on the Fourth, Beall and I watched Eric Kunzel and John Williams conduct the National Symphony Orchestra (which includes my old violin teacher, Louis Hazah) on the steps of the Capitol. Both of these men have risen to tremendous prominence and fame in their profession, but both stand on the shoulders of Arthur Fiedler, the man who made great music accessible once again to a generation which had forgotten how to listen to great music.