Opening bars to a short story

John Dale had a personal soundtrack.  I don't mean that he got songs stuck in his head.  What I mean is that at every major shift in the action of his life, classical music could be heard.  Soft violins as he moved in for a drink at the water fountain.  A crescendo if he lifted his four year old niece in the air to swing her around. 

It might sound sort of romantic and exciting to have a musical score accompany your every waking move, but it was distracting at best.  When he was alone, it made it hard to study.  The minute he felt frustrated by a concept, the percussion section would kick in and then perhaps some horns. 

At worst, waiting, for instance, outside the principal's office in eighth grade, because his teacher thought he was playing a prank to distract everyone on the math test with a rather loud rendition of Strauss' Blue Danube waltz, the fact that the opening bars to Prokiev's creepy Dance of the Knights began as soon as the principal opened his door to beckon him inside... well it didn't help his case. 

John was expelled after a series of meetings in which he was directed ever-more-emphatically to reveal the location of the speakers he must have installed all over the school.  "You!"  his math teacher yelled in the last parent-teacher-principal meeting.  "You are a MUSIC TERRORIST!!"

Eighth grade was probably the worst year of John's life.  He was expelled from that school in September, and by several schools thereafter.  By Christmas his parents had decided to home-school him. 

He was examined by a veritable army of psychiatric and medical professionals, initially to break his antisocial speaker-hiding behavior, and then to see if his vocal cords could project complex orchestral music at a distance, and finally by a doctor who was also a priest and hypothesized that he was possessed by demonic spirits.

Eventually his parents gave up, accepted the utter lack of explanation for the phenomenon and John developed a kind of phobia about being in quiet spaces with strangers.  A shrieking air-lifted toddler was unfazed by violin accompaniment, but adults in the library or a mall elevator were a different story.  Though frequently they didn't identify him as the source of the music, their initially puzzled or annoyed expressions set him on edge.

It had not always been this way; John was a pretty normal kid, which is to say that music only played when adults set records on the retro turntable in his parents' den or popped a tape into the car stereo.  When he was ten, he got his own discman as a birthday present. He listened amiably while pedaling his bike through the neighborhood after school or on the bus in the morning, but otherwise was not especially obsessed with music.

The trouble began when he hit puberty, the fall after his 13th birthday, just a few weeks into the eighth grade.  At this point, he liked loud, energetic rock music - he was certainly not a classical music fan, nor had he ever had piano lesssons or played an instrument.  In fact anyone who had approached his unusual condition with logic rather than assumptions would have immediately realized that even if he was the epicenter of the music, it was in no way a conscious result of his own actions or knowledge.  John didn't know 99% of the pieces that played near him.

Some of it was recognizable, even to the layperson - the score of Beethoven's 9th or Rachmaninoff's Funeral March.  Much of it was more obscure.  But all of it was composed long before John was born and in many cases long after the composers and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren were dead.