DECOMPOSING MOZART

One of the many valuable aspects of MEDIUM (a writers' website I am a member of) is that it constitutes an opportunity to leisurely graze across many fields of topical subject matter, pausing here and there to chew contentedly on various things that often or not won’t quite digest as well as four ruminant stomachs (or even one) should enable them to be.

Very recently, in the course of perusing an article by one of our more astute gazetteers (Garrett Andrew Schneider), my progress down that particular pathway was unexpectedly arrested by a reference he made to another article that tripped me up as effectively as might an unseen bramble bush, lying low across the trail.

The specific thorny trip-wire in reference was a piece by Mark Vanhoenacker titled Requiem: Classical Music in America is Dead, appearing in an on-line journal called SLATE. In the short span of about 3 pages Vanhoenacker (a good Belgian name, if ever there was one) manages to insult a whole range of people, including the, er…ahem…’weight-challenged’, women, ‘old people’, ‘young people’, nerds, business entrepreneurs, and capitalists among us. That’s surely a breathtaking sampling!

Towards the end of his analysis, Mr. V. (I’ll content myself with that identifier, given the unwieldy articulation of his Flemish surname) makes the remark that ‘classical music has been down so long, it must somehow be due for a comeback’. That tends to suggest to me that he is not entirely down on (note for the linguists among you: ‘against’, as opposed to ‘in agreement with’) the classical musical repertory, that perhaps he may even enjoy it but hasn’t let that fact interfere with his writerly urge to expostulate.

All of this prompted my curiosity as to who exactly the author of the piece this chap was. Given my highly and reflexively opinionated nature, I was almost dead-certain that Mr. V. was some sort of literary Eminem or white liberal rap fan, since his arguments initially sounded to me as if he were bound & determined to put the final nail in classical music’s coffin lid.

And so, checking further into this, I discovered to my utter surprise that Mr. V. is not a young, ageist whipper-snapper by any means, but is in fact a 45-year old British Airways captain whose regular offices are a Boeing 787 and 747 airliner. A fellow (aviation is one of my chief life-involvements) junior birdman, so it would seem! You could have knocked me over with a fly-by-wire spoiler control surface!

Mark Vanhoenacker regularly freelances for several well-known national publications (including The Financial Times and The New York Times, among others). He has also written two books, one of them titled ‘How to Land a Plane’ (which has been critically acclaimed as an excellent piece of writing; this surely should be 'must-read' stuff on those lengthy transatlantic commercial flights so many of us undertake on holiday). A list of his many interesting articles may be viewed here.

In so many words, Mr. V. is a writer with considerable street-creds (unlike some of us who can merely aspire to such heights of illuminating articulation…he said, self-deprecatingly).

All that having been stated, V’s thesis utterly intrigued me, a person who has been a life-long appréciateur of what so many with varying degrees of imprecision refer to as ‘classical music.’

Classical music, according to one definition, refers to: “…art music produced or rooted in the traditions of Western culture, including both liturgical (religious) and secular music. While a more precise term is also used to refer to the period from 1750 to 1820 (the Classical period), it generally spans the broad time frame from before the 6th century AD to the present day, which includes the Classical period and various other periods. The central norms of this tradition became codified between 1550 and 1900, which is known as the common-practice period.”

In case anyone is wondering what the term ‘art music’ is all about, “…art music (alternately called classical music, cultivated music, serious music, and canonic music) is music that implies advanced structural and theoretical considerations or a written musical tradition. The terms ‘serious’ or ‘cultivated’ are frequently used in relation to music in order to present a contrast with ordinary, everyday music (i.e. popular and folk music, also called ‘vernacular music’). At the beginning of the 20th century art music (for example) was divided into ‘serious music’ and ‘light music’.”

Leaving you to ponder that backstory and continuing, my grandmother was a classical pianist who, after graduating from Lake Erie Women’s Seminary in the late 1800s with a degree in musicology, supplemented the family’s income with her piano studio not far from Idaho’s spectacular ‘Sun Valley Resort’. Throughout my adolescence she vainly strove to make a little pianist out of me, citing the fact that I had what she called ‘a perfect hand’ for the instrument (read: long, slender fingers). Given my youthful rebelliousness (and the lack of a father to inflict Amy Chua-like Tiger-proctoring disciplines on me), I naturally refused to sit down each day to practice. I also have the dubious distinction of having successfully evaded learning to play the violin (the notes of which sounded to me like a cat being slowly slaughtered and ground up in a meat grinder), as well. I have an aversion to both meat-grinders and cats today.

As for learning to play either of those instruments, it was what the ‘properly brought-up little (white) boy’ did in those days. This doesn’t mean that I lacked any affinity whatsoever for music, for I ended up playing a brass orchestral instrument in school, but I also found myself inexplicably attracted to my grandmother’s rather phenomenal library of old 78 RPM RCA Victor classics.

Since the summers we spent with her in Idaho were marked by a conspicuous paucity of amusements and little friends with whom to enjoy them in the neighborhood, I quickly learned to entertain myself. I should also say that in addition to picking up an appreciation for ‘serious music’ at this early age, I also found myself forced to develop an active imagination, thanks chiefly to my grand-mum’s immense, wide-ranging and up-to-date library full of books. To her influence goes full credit for making me the second-rate polymath (junior-grade) that I am today, and since thoughtfulness was the essence of what I had to avail in order to amuse myself, it made me reflexively prone to that state as a natural condition. The fact that I also possess a half-assed intellect is sad, but that’s beside the point.

Aside from many solitary adventures in the spectacular (and rattlesnake-infested) scenic settings that characterise the serenely spectacular Idaho Sawtooth Wilderness, I spent much of my spare time listening to grand-mum’s record collection. It was mostly symphonic music, interspersed with a few operatic classics, but she had all the acknowledged grand masters of the classical repertory and I suppose they eventually excavated and filled a substantial amount of cranial space in my childish noggin, a storehouse of references which remained largely intact throughout my life.

And so it was that I came upon ‘classical music’ very early in my life, unlike a great many of my contemporary peers.

Over the succeeding decades, this appreciation for the classical genre actually gained me few if any points among the savage little barbarians I went to school with, since although we were all subject to the same rock-and-roll sound of the 50s, I secretly preferred symphonies to the popular hits that were at that time shaking, rattling and rolling everyone at school. And given the savage nature of pre-adolescents, woe be it for me if any of them discovered this; consequently, it was my carefully husbanded secret.

Of course, my mother, who was a well-educated school marm (with a graduate degree in art), tried to cultivate an even more erudite musical appreciation in me, insisting that I accompany her to rare community events wherein some international musical prodigy or another (I recall Yehudi Menuhin, in particular) would deign to visit the dusty little outback bastion of settled civilization we inhabited to wow the simple folk with his spectacular virtuosity. As an avowed hater (both of cat slaughtering and violinists), the result of attending something like that was for me not unlike the equivalent of having all my wisdom teeth removed by a sadistic dentist who had formerly been an SS camp guard (or being forced to listen, bound hand and foot, to nothing but continuous, misogynistic gangsta-rap in an acoustic isolation chamber). Of course, I can only guess at the comparisons, since I’ve fortunately never experienced either, under duress or otherwise.

What I am trying to say here, folks, is that I am one of those hopelessly old and out-of-touch white people whom Mr. V. was referring to in his remarks about the demise of classical music and it pains me to hear that someone actually feels this way about the music I love.

Coincidentally, in that same original article by Garrett Schneider in which he mentions Mr. V’s article, Schneider makes mention, among his accountings of Amy Chua’s ‘Tiger-Mother’ rulebook tenets, of the fact that ‘…spending countless hours devoted to piano (and/) or violin practice’ runs contrary to the attempt to prepare your children for a career in a competitive world.’

I was more than slightly surprised to hear this, since ‘serious music’ requires an extraordinary amount of both mental discipline and uncompromising commitment, given the arduous and challenging nature of the undertaking. That same rigorous discipline involved is itself one of the chief underlying dynamics that should enable any individual to compete successfully and attain success, no matter what the endeavor. In today’s hard-driven world of occupational ‘Professionalität’ and especially in view of the popular (if extremely facile) belief by those on the left of the political spectrum that ‘every child needs a college degree’, to lack even the slightest iota of that drive to excel is surely to fail on a lower rung of the ladder that leads to a flourishing career in just about anything.

‘Serious music’ has (as has already been noted) strong links not just to cultivating skilled hand-eye coordination abilities, but to development of a formidable brain. The innate links that such music (and appreciation of it) has to higher disciplines such as mathematics are well known and quite substantially documented for anyone interested enough to look more closely into it. Further, it has also been shown that classical music has a soothing, gentling and humanizing effect on those who listen to it (exactly the opposite effect of what passes for ‘pop-music’ these days). In fact, every now and then, we run across a reference to that well-known instance in which business owners in a particularly bad part of town played classical music from loudspeakers…an effect that literally chased all the bad dudes away. It’s true, as is the fact that selected kinds of classical music have a beneficial, pacifying effect on small infants and children. There are other neurological studies citing enhanced brain-development in such children, as well.

But this remark sets into perspective a curious aspect of what ‘education’ has today morphed into, since whereas classical education aimed at conferring in the individual a far more wide-ranging armamentarium of knowledge assets and critical-thinking capabilities, today’s Philistine American (read: materialist, commercial profit-driven) culture has almost succeeded in remaking education into little more than a consummate job-prep experience for those possessed of an unremarkable mentality. It is one of the classic tragedies of contemporary American education that this has become the case, and yet that’s what the conventional American wisdom regards education’s principal benefit conferred upon today’s college graduates: a well-paying job.

But moving along on the subject of ‘old dead white guy music’ (as some snarky young progressive individuals express it), serious music is an order of magnitude beyond the sort of hard-driven, beat-redolent sound that seems to be so popular today among those under 50. In my own instance, I find that I do not enjoy ANY music of any kind unless I can give it my full, entire, undivided attention. That is to say, unless I can sit comfortably (or perhaps uncomfortably in a concert hall setting) and focus exclusively on the myriad complex and sophisticated sound-tapestries that are being instrumentally woven, there’s more than something seriously missing in the music-listening experience for me.

Contrast that to something along the lines of (frequently misogynistic or abjectly crude) hip-hop, rap and similar ilk and there’s little or no cerebral requisite of analysis or appreciation, in a thoughtful sense: such stuff is entirely a visceral, emotional crucible of raw, boiling, bubbling sensation that pushes hormonal buttons and evokes intensely primal responses of pure nervous reflexivity.

Popular music today is not generally viewed by anyone as a pleasing cathartic mental experience, useful for positively stimulating the brain and inducing peaceful harmony. Rather it typically serves more frequently as hard-edged background noise, all too often underscored by puerile and highly repetitive motifs that simply help to further drive home the beat of the sound itself. The ancient primitives had their drums. Today, our modern adolescent primitives have this as a substitute, so it would seem.

A curious example of this is to be found in the monster, mega-bass sound systems installed in automobiles that create such humongous bass vibrations that exposure to within several hundred feet of them threatens the preservation of one’s hearing. This quirky (and highly annoying) practice probably originated as a ‘Hail-Mary’ type work-around response to law enforcement diktats specifying that ‘unreasonably loud music’ was not legally condonable (i.e. and would be subject to fines and punishments for offenders).

Thus, whatever ‘musical’ qualities originally accompanying the sounds were dampened down almost to the point of inaudibility, while the super-amplified bass frequencies were inversely scaled up so high that they intrude well above the threshold of pain in human beings (try taking a sound-meter and sampling one, sometime). For some odd reason I am loathe to explain, this seems not to have attracted the same level of attention by our community LEOs as did the predecessor form (although one reasonable explanation may well be that as LEO manpower became increasingly scarce in today’s more violent urban environment, concurrent with an escalation of far more ‘serious’ social infractions, it simply became both impracticable and/or impossible to enforce these bans).

Whatever the explanation, the chief point here is that if ‘classical music’, which demands an order of magnitude higher level of mental agility and applied interpretative understanding, is dead, I fear the eventual outcome for society in its broadest and most all-inclusive terms is very, very ominous indeed.

Mention has been made (in the cited articles) of the fact that various forms of music that were formerly quite commonplace in ‘polite white society’ (classical music, opera, ‘honkified’ jazz, etc.) are today rapidly disappearing. The reason for this was also explained as due to an older generation of white folks dying out, the inference being that when they are eventually gone, everything will finally be hunky-dory (please excuse the use of that semi-racist term, since it was carefully explained to me who exactly ‘hunky-dory’ was and why I therefore probably shouldn’t use it). Since music appreciation varies so much in any population, being largely a matter of personal taste (if we may put aside education and higher aesthetics considerations for the moment), it certainly is true that white audiences that still enjoy jazz and opera are diminishing.

I don’t think there’s any argument over much of what Mark Vanhoenacker stated in his eloquently crafted article, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that classical music is any more or less valuable than eating, sleeping and/or breathing, with regard to ensuring harmonious human co-existence on this troubled planet. Not if you value intelligent reflectivity and the brilliant construct of a human mind that is supremely and beneficially stimulated by appreciation of the traditional classical musical milieu.

I found myself just recently feeling some palpable remorse over several things in this regard. One of them being that there are (just as Mr. V observed) fewer opportunities to attend a good public symphonic concert these days. Another was that while we still have a fairly good and conscionable local ‘public radio’ station that regularly airs jazz, classics and even operatic works, even in that setting the quality of the music selected has suffered from the need to continually plumb the most remote nooks and crannies of the classical music repertory in order to avoid needless repetition. After all, when you’re playing these things all day long, that requires quite a bit of artful program planning and our public radio station only manages to exist at the mercy of the local State College staff, with its unpaid volunteers bearing much of the burden. As a result, we end up with far too much annoying (to me, at least, since, in my simple and uncomplicated way I much prefer the stylistic bombast of the Romantic Era) Baroque Era music, obscure instrumental virtuosos, and such, with a relatively sparse selection of symphonic classics (my preference).

It is sad that too many superficially aware fans of classical music (read: not as knowledgeable as they ought to be) do not understand that whereas the composition of sweeping symphonic classics requires a far greater level of mastery than a mess of lesser Baroque compositions out there, too often a station that still plays classics will slap on some annoyingly simplistic Baroque without deeper consideration when the choices become more difficult to meet. But as I remarked above, I personally have never quite been able to get a Handel on Baroque…

As for opera on the above venue, I’ve never cared personally for a regular diet of opera of any form, although there are a few German operas I am fond of (and even fewer Italian). Jazz for me has in particular also been a ‘Meh!’ thing, although I was born in San Francisco at a time when the Beat preoccupation with jazz was in full-swing. My experience is that, with a few exceptions, ‘white-cats’ just don’t dig it properly.

Not many years ago, Sacramento (CA) had an annual jazz festival, but as the years passed, fewer and fewer people attended and eventually it was changed from a jazz-only event to a more generic ‘music festival’ (with supposedly broader appeal). I can’t say I was particularly sad about that, although I admit that I do miss not having the opportunity to enjoy good black jazz (and not the sanitized white-folks stuff that passes for it so often, these days). San Francisco, back in the 50s, was about as close to New Orleans as one could get way out here on the west coast, unfortunately Several years ago, this same local public radio station organized what they informed us was a ‘classical music river cruise’ on the Donau River in Europe. Starting in Germany and progressing through Czechia (the Czech Republic), Austria and finally terminating in Budapest, we were promised a series of classical music performances and concerts all along the route. There were also arrangements made to have local classical artists come aboard at port-calls to perform chamber music in trios. To say it was thrilling is an understatement.

Looking back at this magnificent experience, I can unreservedly say that it was perhaps one of the peak travel experiences of my life. The Donau itself is steeped in fantastic classical music history, but there’s something utterly unmatched in experiencing, say, a Mozart symphony in the actual original performance venue itself.

Who, for example, can possible forget listening to a famed work of one of the masters in the Wien Statsoper and afterwards taking a romantic walk in the light rain along the streetlamps that illuminate the famous Wiener Ringstrasse. To say such an experience is romantic to an extreme (if one is descended from Northern European ancestors) is not fully doing justice to the experience.

And yes, it is a cultural derivative that evokes Old Europe’s storied heritage, which seems increasingly (in today’s politically correct, diverse environment) unpopular these days among younger individuals (who often complain about the predatory nature of the bad old days of oppressive, white colonial culture). But that doesn’t negate or obscure the sheer, essential genius that underlies the music of that culture, which, like the baby, should not be summarily thrown out with the bathwater. I mean, an 11-year-old boy (Mozart, to cite merely one example) composing masterfully brilliant symphonies before he even hits puberty? How many of today’s pop-artists (aside from a number of incredible Chinese prodigies) can make similar claims, I wonder?

Very recently, our local Public Broadcasting System station aired another of those delightfully frothy, Viennese musical spectaculars starring the music of Dutch maestro Andre Rieu’s Johann Strauss Orchestra. It was a delightful tribute to this sort of Northern European music that so many of us classical lightweights love, attended by a wide variety of people, all of whom savor this sort of supremely light-hearted musical cleverness that aptly characterises the Habsburg Empire’s brilliant musical heritage. Naturally, the audience was replete with a majority of middle-aged and older individuals. Many were gray-haired, although there were a not-insignificant number of younger people also attending. What was most obvious was the fact that everyone there…EVERYONE, regardless of age…was enthralled by the experience, hundreds getting up to dance spontaneously to those much-loved waltz melodies throughout the performance.

As I watched the spectacle, I found myself wondering, much to my chagrin, about how things would change when the last of those many thousands of people passed on. Would such great musical pleasures also disappear with them? Or would this ‘art music’ form we call classical music survive the generational schism and be transmitted on to other generations (and cultures) in perpetuity?

At this time, any speculation would be impossible, really, since, at least in America, we have endowed our younger members of society with the same level of intellectual privilege and mature regard as the oldest and wisest among us. In so doing, we have essentially said ‘your music, as uncomplicated and primitive as it may be and regardless of its frequently scatological shades of non-complexity, driven by and prompting the release of raw emotional reactionism, is the categorical equal of music conceived of and composed in the grand old, traditional manner by true musical (OK, dead white guy) geniuses.’ As the great Spanish composer Isaac Ilbeniz might have put it, “Que Tragedia!”

That sweeping cultural endowment is arguably a grievous mistake, but that’s the irrefutable result of what our Philistine, market-created-and-driven commercial, materialist American economy has perversely done in the soulless pursuit of profit from younger members of society who are still incomplete life forms, still developing, still growing neurologically, and who are consequently not yet fully apprised of the long-term consequences of who they are, what they do or what they are engaged in.

From my outlook, since no one escapes from life alive, after that final curtain on life falls, bringing the final act with its unknown consequences to each of us, it’s all academic at best. But until such a time as that occurs, I personally shall remain a great believer in the enduring value of what we call ‘classical music’ to the entire world.

And who knows? Next time I fly on a British Airways Boeing 787 to one of my favorite European destinations, perhaps our pilot will be none other than Captain Mark Vanhoenacker himself. It will certainly be an ironic rendezvous in the sky, to say the very least.

As for Wolfgang Amadeus and all the other incomparable geniuses of Northern European musical history, he will just have to continue decomposing peacefully as he has for so many years now, since whatever transpires no longer matters to him, either.

And the consequences of my having furiously resisted learning to play the piano as a child? It remains chief among my many regrets in life, viewed more than 6 decades back, as it now is, in the past.

Amy Chua's admonishments on 'Tiger Mother' parenting take on, in today's increasingly 'difficult' world, a whole new cogency, in my opinion. Your precious little narcissistic darlings may end up hating you as children, but they will very likely reverse poles completely once they are old enough to understand the wisdom behind strict parental guidelines and agendas.

So suck it up, cupcake, and be the demanding authority-figure your children secretly want...and NEED. Before it's too late.