EDITORIAL ARTICLES

Contemporary music is often perceived to be imbued with esoteric and abstract meaning, leaving many concert goers thinking, “Well, I suppose that was good, but I didn’t understand it!” As a music student at Swarthmore College, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, there seemed to be a culture of intellectual competition in how obscure musical meaning could be, either intended or interpreted. During my sophomore year, I took a seminar on Contemporary American Composers, where we read all about a particular composer during the week leading up to the seminar meeting, and then the composer in question would attend our seminar to lecture, if they wished, and answer our questions. I remember Milton Babbitt’s visit as the ultimate in the intellectual interpretation exercise. The music we looked at of his was strictly serial, with numerical and mathematical patterns and iterations buried in the score. Someone asked him how he would instruct a trombone player to play a certain section of a piece with feeling, and his response, as I remember it, was that this was an irrelevant question.

Another week, George Crumb came to visit our seminar. I immediately identified with his contrasting approach to composition, as it was refreshingly down to earth, and based on what seem to me to be aesthetic creativity. He told us about all the instruments he had lying around in his home and how he would tinker around and try out different combinations to see what timbres sounded good together. Only then would he sit down to actually compose at the piano.

The following year, I had the opportunity to play in a recording session of George Crumb’s “Dream Sequence (Images II)” with members of Orchestra 2001, the resident contemporary music ensemble at Lang Concert Hall, on the Swarthmore campus. The instrumentation for this piece is prepared piano, violin, cello, percussion, and “off-stage glass harmonica,” a set of pitched wine glasses. The percussion set includes Japanese temple bells, a Thai wooden buffalo bell, crotalés, sleigh bells, maraca, and suspended cymbals. Crumb utilized the piano’s range, colors, and special properties for potential acoustic resonance, such as having the pianist hang paper clips on particular strings, so that those notes had a metallic buzz to them, and reaching into the body of the piano and scraping credit cards along the strings. The instruments alternate, sometimes overlapping, with flickers of movement.

Surrounding these explorations of timbre and resonance are the floating and eerie shimmers of wine glasses, where the players run a wet finger around the rim of the glass causing vibrations in the glass itself to create a crystalline drone. (You can try this at home!) Playing a few together, at different pitches gives the whole piece a hypnotic atmosphere of silvery grays and greens. My role, along with two friends, was to keep one or two wine glasses each resonating with its haunting and space pervading tone for the duration of the piece.

Crumb had specific glasses that he brought, labeled with the particular pitches, and lines indicating the level to which they should be filled with water. Apparently, great care had been taken to find glasses with the right responsiveness, timbre, and clarity, and to find the precise water level that would be in tune with the main instruments. The pitch is determined by the size of the glass and the amount of water it contains, and the loudness depends on the speed of the player’s finger. It is quite difficult to create a completely steady dynamic, and the subtle variations, layered over a few different pitches, creates an amorphous but fluctuating cloud of sound where each pitch floats, as if breathing, in and out of focus.

I was quite intimidated to be in the same concert hall as this great American composer, not to mention to be involved in a session recording his composition. But he proved to be more concerned with getting the right feeling out of the performances of the piece, with each gesture rich with movement, rather than every note in the right place. Crumb is refreshingly straightforward, attentive to aural and visual pleasure and detail, seeming to prioritize personal response and meaning over buried symbolism of esoteric and abstract theories, though his pieces are certainly rich with discoveries that are not heard, such as the beautiful and artistic scores themselves. My experience of playing with Crumb showed this, but it is also evident in a story told to me by my wonderful flute teacher at the time. She was rehearsing An Idyll for the Misbegotten, his piece for amplified solo flute and a three-person percussion section. She had prepared the piece technically and musically, but there was one passage where she was not sure about the particular interpretation Crumb had in mind. When she asked him about it, he replied in his warm, slow drawl, “Well, Pam, how do you think it should go?”

As a performer used to being at the mercy of composers and conductors, being given interpretive artistic reign like this was a wonderful, though scary, gift of freedom. Fortunately, George Crumb is open to the creative variations of live performance and collaborative aesthetic exploration.

Further Information

George Crumb’s official website: www.georgecrumb.net

Orchestra 2001: www.orchestra2001.org

We can safely assume that the paparazzi will flock to Justin Timberlake rather than Bernard Haitink. And it’s unlikely that Martha Argerich will beat out Beyonce for the cover of People magazine. Nevertheless, the 49th Annual Grammy Awards, to be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 11, 2007, features some of the classical music world’s most glittering stars and coveted awards. Here’s a look at a few of this year’s classical categories and the musicians and albums nominated.

Selected by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy (short for “Gramophone”) Awards consist of 108 categories, of which 11 honor classical musicians. (Another two are given for the production and engineering of classical albums.) After record companies and members of NARAS submit their entries for the year, the members vote twice, first to narrow the list in each category down to five finalists, second to select the winner. To ensure that the voters know something about the repertoire, rules state no one can vote in more than nine specialized categories in the first round or more than eight in the second round. Finally, all members of the Recording Academy help choose the four biggest awards – Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. In theory, these can come from any musical genre, but no classical record or artist has ever won.

Out of all the nominees, this year’s sentimental favorite is surely the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, nominated in the categories of Best Classical Album and Best Classical Vocal Performance. Hunt Lieberson died on July 3, 2006, succumbing to cancer at the age of only fifty-two. After her breakout performance, in a 1985 production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare staged by quirky director Peter Sellars, Hunt Lieberson quickly gained a devoted following for her distinctive, rich tone and incredible musical intelligence. Baroque music, particularly Handel, was one of her specialties, but she also performed a great deal of contemporary music, particularly after she married composer Peter Lieberson in 1997. It is her husband’s music that is featured on the nominated album, namely his Rilke Songs, Horn Concerto, and a work for cello and orchestra called Six Realms.

Rounding out the category of Best Classical Album are Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony Orchestra for their recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, Martha Argerich and many collaborators for their disc of chamber music entitled Live from the Lugano Festival 2005, and René Jacobs and the Freiburger Barockorchestra for their new recording of Mozart’s late serious opera La Clemenza di Tito. All of the conductors involved have previously won Grammys, as has Argerich.

Hunt Lieberson’s competitors for Best Classical Vocal Performance include a three-time winner in the category, the baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Quasthoff’s current nomination is for the album Betrachte, meine Seele, a compilation of sacred arias by such composers as Bach, Handel, and Mendelssohn. British tenor Ian Bostridge, nominated for his recording of Britten song cycles, took home a Grammy in 1999. Bernarda Fink, also up for Best Classical Album and Best Opera Performance as Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito, has put together an unusual disc of songs from her native Argentina, in tandem with her brother, bass-baritone Marcos Fink. The final Grammy candidate in the category is baritone Patrick Mason, whose album showcases the little-known songs of American composer Amy Beach.

One of the most talked-about works of the year, the opera Ainadamar, by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, has received multiple nods for a Grammy. Taking as its subject the death of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, Ainadamar incorporates popular styles from all over the world, including flamenco and klezmer. One of the nominations for Ainadamar is in the category of Best Opera Recording, which means that the award would go not to Golijov but to the producer and performers. The latter include singers Kelly O’Connor and Dawn Upshaw (a frequent Golijov collaborator) as well as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under the baton of Robert Spano.

In addition, Ainadamar is one of the choices for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, going up against two other pieces recorded by Spano and the Atlanta Symphony: The Here and Now by Christopher Theofanidis and Paul Revere’s Ride by David Del Tredici. Rounding out the category are Elliott Carter (for Boston Concerto) and James MacMillan (A Scotch Bestiary). Carter has already won in this category for his Violin Concerto; the others, all of whom are considerably younger, would be first-time winners. Golijov was nominated last year for Ayre and is probably the favorite this year.

In the year that marks the thirtieth anniversary of her death, legendary soprano Maria Callas is being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Ironically, she never received a Grammy while she was alive. At the opposite extreme is the conductor Sir Georg Solti, who raked in the most Grammy awards of any musician in ANY genre – 31, with another 74 nominations besides!

Unfortunately, space does not permit an overview of all the categories and nominees.

For the official list, check http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/49th_Show/list.aspx

Music has a notoriously uneasy relationship with language. Words always seem inadequate to the experience we have of listening to music especially any sort of explanatory or theoretical discussion. In large part when we come across these sorts of things- in a concert program, liner note article or classroom most of us have one or both of two responses:

1. “Yuck, I hate thinking about music like this, -why can’t I just listen to it?”

I think it’s worth standing this one on its head because even the most hardened academic has had, I suspect, to deal with such feelings. The question is can we “just” listen to music without thinking about it. Well, that depends on exactly what we mean by thinking, and how we describe that thinking in words after we have both listened and thought. This is traditionally the province of music theory, a discipline occupying a place in the heart’s of most people somewhere between algebra and accounting.

The problem with music theory, as opposed to literary or art theory, is that we really have to take it on faith that the things we are talking about have even the remotest relationship to actual music. Whereas, if someone talks about the figure in foreground in a painting, or the difficulties the main character goes through in a novel everybody can immediately see the relevance. By which I mean that you can’t read a book and have no idea that there is a main character, nor can you look at a painting and be unaware that there is a figure in it, but you can listen to a piece of music quite happily and be totally unaware of the technical aspects of it. In fact, except for formal classes in harmony, the overwhelming majority of people listen to the overwhelming majority of pieces without really pausing to think about, well, anything at all except “here comes that one bit I like”. And I’m talking about musicians too – myself included. So, to suit up in the music theory armor and start paying attention to all those chords and intervals and themes seems not only like hard work, but hard work that is actually taking us away from what we like about music not towards it.

The problem seems to revolve around this thing “theory”. We tend to associate it with the scientific method, “Einstein’s theory of relativity” –that sort of thing. Basically we take theory to be factual postulates, or at least fact-based guesswork, that explains some sort of complex phenomenon. Music theory therefore is usually portrayed as explanations of what is “really” going on in a piece of music. On the other hand most music theory is exceptionally dull and music, at least music we like we find the opposite of dull, so our minds, not unfairly, rebel. The problem again is that the things that theory seems to be concerned with don’t seem to be the things that we love about music.

But there is an interesting thing about this word theory, Originally the word “theory” comes from an old Greek word “theor”. A theor was someone you who send to visit an oracle or to witness a divination, or ritual, or some other dwelling on a mystery or existential paradox. The original meaning of theory then was some sort of intense concentration on a mystery the goal of which was not to explain that mystery but rather to deepen or intensify it. I think we could do worse than to try and incorporate this sense of theory into our approach to music.

What I mean is we shouldn’t think of discussing music as a weird kind of algebra for sounds, or crossword puzzles for notes, but rather an intensification of whatever it is we are doing when we are really listening to a piece and totally following it. I try and think of theory as a very slow and intense kind of listening that you then try and talk about, rather than any sort of proving out of a conceptual or structural scheme. The best writing on music makes us more interested in a piece rather than less interested. It is, unfortunately, rare.

The other very common response we all have to discussions of pieces of music is:

1. “Yes but, was Beethoven (or the composer in question) really thinking X when he wrote this? (X = any given analytic observation being made about a piece)”

This is a killer because it seems as though what we are doing when we analyze a piece of music is trying to uncover the secret plan of the composer thereby understanding what the piece is all about right? So if the composer was not thinking of something, but we seem to hear it in the music, who’s right? It must be the composer surely; after all we aren’t trying to tell Beethoven what his music was all about …are we? Well, as it turns out, that is exactly what we are trying to do.

There is actually a name for this problem, its called the “intentional fallacy”, meaning the fallacy of assuming that a person’s intent in saying (or writing) something is the sole determinant in what it can mean. We see this in everyday life all the time. Someone may say something, and even entirely mean it, but we are free to interpret the meaning of what they say on the basis of their body language, the situation at the time, our own prior experience, even our own internal emotional state, and so forth. We are not obliged to simply and only “take people at their word” about everything. Indeed, to do so would give us a false and potentially dangerous view of the world.

This basic situation is made much more acute, and also harder to recognize, when it comes to music. Firstly, it is in general very hard to say concrete things about music of any kind, even though there certainly seems to be a lot going on, and composers are not necessarily very good at it – if they were they would be writers or theorists and not composers. Secondly, in most instances composers have not said what they think their music is all about at all, or when they did they focused on issues which seem trivial to us, either because they were so close to their own work that they could not get perspective on it, or because over the intervening years concepts about music has changed. Lastly, just because someone can write music well doesn’t mean that they are particularly self-aware. It’s always quite possible that they have literally no earthly idea what their music is “about” but just “how it goes”.

In any case, even if a composer had written an exhaustive essay saying” I Ludwig Van Beethoven do set forth herein the entire musical meaning of my Piano Sonata Opus XYZ” we are not obliged to take him at his word any more than we are when our friend “explains” why they have had a string of bad relationships. Think of analysis not as archeological work to uncover the fixed objective meaning of the work of a composer, but more as a collaboration between you, the composer, maybe even a particular performer, and then all the various other people who have thought about the piece since it was written, (plus you have to factor in all the music that you know that the composer didn’t), all aiming at a new interpretation of what the piece might mean. Pieces are moving objects.

Or think of it this way: The composer just starts the process: he throws a ball over a high fence, he has maybe an idea of where he would like it to go but once he throws it, its literally out of his hands, we are on the other side of the fence and how or whether we catch it, what it means to us when we do, is all determined not only by how he threw it but by circumstances after it left his hand, and by our own abilities and internal conditions. All this is a long way of saying “It doesn’t matter what Beethoven, or any other composer thought, or didn’t think about their music (especially since for the most part we have no idea what that was), what we are interested in is what we think about their music”.

So, whatever our resistance to talking or reading about music I think that it is ultimately an essential act and however we might like to shut down the speech centers in our brain and just let music happen to us I think that we are language making creatures to the core and some attempt to mediate the musical experience is ultimately crucial for our understanding of it.

During a visit with my family for the holidays, my mother reminisced about her early childhood, growing up in the Chicago suburbs. On Sunday afternoons, her parents would relax and read the Sunday paper, and her father always liked to put Symphony No. 9 in E minor “From the New World” by Antonín Dvořák on the record player. For my mother today, this piece holds both the warmth of family and the imagination of the American frontier. If you think music for children needs to be short and simple, think again.

There have been debates for several years about the so-called Mozart Effect, the theory that children who listen to Mozart perform better on tests, and even become smarter. Many studies since the initial one in 1991 by Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis have shown this to be not necessarily true. However, research has shown that children who play an instrument and are involved in music learning and participation, tend to improve their concentration, hand-eye coordination, and analytical skills. Playing music is also an outlet for creative expression. Being involved in concert bands and youth orchestras throughout my own school-age years let me make lasting friendships, and experience the power of communal artistry.

Attending a live music performance is more memorable than listening to recorded music, and active study and participation is better yet. Children can become familiar with the intricacies of the music through repetition and hands-on experience more so than just listening or watching. Still, listening to classical music with your children can be an enjoyable way to spend quality time. Many composers have written music specifically for children, and there are dozens of CDs packaged specifically to play for children, but do not feel limited by these choices.

Classical works written for children often highlight particular instruments or instrument families, so that the listener may become familiar with the timbre and quality of each instrument or family. English composer Benjamin Britten wrote The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in 1946. In this piece, he highlights each instrument grouping, working his way through the orchestra, from the winds, through the strings, to the brass, and then percussion. The piece ends with a full-orchestral fugue.

Several other full-scale works for children use specific instruments to portray various characters or animals. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf from 1936 is one of the most beloved orchestral children’s stories. In this piece, each character has a distinct instrument and melodic theme. For example, the duck’s part is played by the oboe, and Peter’s theme is a warm melody on the strings. The Carnival of the Animals (1886) by Camille Saint-Saëns does not tell a programmatic story, as does Peter and the Wolf, though each movement illustrates a particular animal or animal group. “The Swan (Le Cygne),” played by a romantic and lyrical cello, is probably the most well known movement of this piece.

Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite may be the ultimate in musical portraits of a wide variety of fantastical characters, from the frightening Mouse King to the mystical Arabian dancers to the grace of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Especially at this time of year, listening to or going to a performance of The Nutcracker may be just the thing to get your little ones up and dancing to classical music.

Achille-Claude Debussy’s solo piano suite “Children’s Corner,” finished in 1908, was not written necessarily for children to play, as the movements are quite complex, but instead to express different moods appropriate to childhood. The last movement is probably the most recognizable: “Golliwogg’s Cake Walk.” Erik Satie also wrote a few suites of short piano pieces. His three Gymnopédies for solo piano have a serene and nostalgic lullaby quality that is great for down time with baby.

The possibilities of fun and captivating pieces, despite not having been written specifically for children, are endless. Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is another suite of richly varied moods, colors, and characters. Mussorgsky originally wrote it for piano, and it has been orchestrated by numerous musicians, including Maurice Ravel and Leopold Stokowski. Aaron Copeland’s orchestral and ballet works, especially Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, and Billy the Kid, are all iconic American classical music works. For a more contemporary American option, try Steve Reich’s Different Trains, a minimalist overlapping of several recordings paired with strings.

One of my personal favorites from my own childhood is Symphony No.1 “The Lord of the Rings” by Johan de Meij, the Dutch composer, in 1988, for concert band. He composed each of the five dramatic movements as portraying a character or an episode from the novels by J.R.R. Tolkien. I love this piece for its dark and stormy sections, and its epic, sweeping melodies.

Children can appreciate the many nuances and complex beauty of classical music, and if the experience is interactive, all the better. Encourage the children around you to learn an instrument and discover the wonderful and infinite world of classical music. Or, at least on the next Sunday afternoon you find yourself lazing about with your kids, put on Dvořák’s New World Symphony and let your children experience a new world of musical excitement.



Internet Resources

www.classicsforkids.com

www.sfskids.org

http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/classicalmusictips/a/childrenclassic.htm - 5 ideas for how to use classical music with your child.

Say what you will about his taste in women, there's never been any doubt regarding Woody Allen's taste in music. Whether the traditional jazz one could predictably hear, from his own ensemble on Monday nights at Manhattan's late, lamented Michael's Pub, or the classical music represented on WOODY ALLEN CLASSICS ---- a compilation of motion picture score bits from LOVE AND DEATH, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S SEX COMEDY, CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, HANNAH AND HER SISTERS and more ---- one cannot doubt his musical veracity.

So today, on his 72nd birthday, we celebrate the latter: WOODY ALLEN CLASSICS (Sony Masterworks SK 53549), available for about 11 bucks at Amazon.com, contains essentials as diverse as "Rhapsody In Blue" ---- recorded by the New York Philharmonic for the opening of MANHATTAN ---- which surely must have been a strong influence on Allen's penchant for the clarinet.

Selections from Bach, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Puccini, Satie and Weill performed by Yo-Yo Ma, the Julliard String Quartet, the Cleveland Orchestra and members of the London Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of George Szell, Michael Tilson Thomas, Zubin Mehta and others, satisfy.

Perhaps the most resonant of all are the Prokofiev selections, including the "Lieutenant Kije' - Op. 60," "Alexander Nevsky - Op. 78," and the inevitable "For The Love Of Three Oranges," from Allen's Tolstoy sendup LOVE AND DEATH. For those who've seen the film, it is impossible to hear "Kije'" in particular, and not picture its final scene, with Allen dancing through fields of wheat ("Wheat...Wheat...") accompanied by a less-grim-than-usual Grim Reaper, in a manner that would make even Ingmar Bergman laugh.

This is a most enjoyable CD, definitely a gorgeous introduction to the composers in question, and a robust 1:13:25 for all.

Before the nineteenth century, generally speaking, opera librettos were often based on mythological subjects and ancient history. The use of contemporary events and depictions of the lower classes (the verismo school of opera) steadily increased, however, during this time period. But setting recent real-life events could at times be controversial. In one famous example, Verdi faced the Neapolitan censors when he tried to have his opera Un ballo in maschera (1857) staged. The opera, based on the assassination of the Swedish king Gustavus III, was deemed too threatening to the status quo, the changes requested of Verdi were increasingly extensive, and it never realized its intended premiere in Naples. Ultimately it was performed in Rome in 1859.

Today, however, recent history is a standard subject for opera composers and few people question its appropriateness. John Adams, for instance, has made significant contributions to the operatic canon with his works Nixon in China, the title of which reveals the subject, and Dr. Atomic, which concerns the Manhattan Project. And, if you have been following recent news in the classical music world, you may have noticed the slew of works premiered or recently programmed on the subject of the Holocaust.

The work that perhaps garnered the most attention was Stefan Heucke’s Das Frauenorchester von Auschwitz, which premiered in Germany in September of 2006. The opera tells the story of this Jewish women’s orchestra, composed of concentration camp inmates, forced to play for the benefit of their captors. Several days ago, another work directly related to the Holocaust, Viktor Ullman’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, was programmed at the Houston Grand Opera. This work, while not directly on the subject of the Holocaust, was written by the composer while he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, and is a loose allegory for Ullman’s contemporary world. The composer ultimately was deported to and died in Auschwitz. And, in just a few days, the University of California at Santa Barbara will present a concert version of Udo Zimmerman’s White Rose, which tells the story of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group. It was written in East Germany in 1967, but it was several decades before it was performed in the West.

These are by no means the only operas based on the Holocaust. Another example is the opera based on William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice. With Styron’s death several days ago, this work has also received frequent mention in the press. The opera by Nicholas Maw premiered in 2002 and details the life of a woman, albeit fictional, who survived Auschwitz and finds herself in a tragically dysfunctional relationship.

But, just as in Verdi’s time, the use of recent historical subjects does raise questions, particularly when the events concern an especially painful and tragic event. Let us consider the question of when is it permissible to approach an historic event and to exploit the material for artistic purposes. Perhaps “permissible,” however, is too loaded a word. Artists should naturally be allowed access to all topics.

That being said, it is nonetheless a reality that when recent events are the subjects of artistic exploration, the final product will necessarily affect living people. In the case of White Rose, for instance, the opera is based on historical writings that have been shown to be commendable but flawed in their accuracy, and unfortunately omit the contributions of most of its members. And, to deviate briefly from the world of opera, take for example the films on 9-11 (World Trade Center and United 93). For many Americans this event is simply too fresh a wound and it is too soon to be able to understand its long-term ramifications and even our own feelings about it.

The Holocaust, to be fair, is now sixty years past. Fewer and fewer survivors from that era are here to tell their stories and it seems that now, large-scale works on the tales from that time are both appropriate and necessary, lest we forget the lessons of the past.

Opera is by its nature a grand spectacle and is perhaps well suited to the exploration of profound tragedy. In conversation with my husband, however, he made the point that often such spectacles are necessarily reductive: complex stories become polarized. And this aspect of spectacle is perhaps the most daunting part of writing an opera on a recent historical subject. Is opera a form that is suited to portray what Hannah Arendt has so famously called the “banality of evil?” Is our understanding of history diminished when its tales may be made to seem somehow distant from our everyday experiences?

So what is the point of these questions? Certainly it is not to condemn the works I mentioned earlier in this essay. In all fairness I have not been able to see them for myself. What’s more, I strongly believe in an artist’s right to examine world events and to offer a particular and hopefully unique view of them, even at the expense of historical accuracy in some cases. However, when reality is tapped for subject material it is also important to evaluate the way it may shape our own perceptions of history.

It is always a strange thing to read accounts of the popular advent of new technologies: the first time someone saw a skyscraper or road on a train, talked the phone or logged onto the Internet. We have the momentary awareness of the enormity of difference between our lives as they are and those other lives “back then,” before there was…. This is particularly true in reading about the advent of the gramophone as a household “appliance.” Previous to that time—the 1910’s and 20’s –the “talking machine,” as it was sometimes called, was to be found mainly in big city arcades along with other cheap diversions where, for a nickel, one could hear a brief rendition of some popular ditty of the gay 90’s while waiting for a train or something like that. In this way, it wasn’t a remarkably different experience for people from listening to a brass band on the street corner or any other of the myriad” live” musical performances that made up the sonic landscape of the day.

As the gramophone moved into the households of millions of people around the world though, some previously unencountered taboos had to be confronted. For instance, the formerly impossible act of someone listening to a piece of music all alone. It is hard for us to imagine the social resistance to this now completely ordinary act. But at the time, coming upon someone sitting by themselves, perhaps in a darkened room, listening to Fritz Kreisler, or Caruso all by themselves was considered unseemly, and quite embarrassing. As though they were sneaking a drink or a pull on an opium pipe. There were even articles on the subject in the new periodicals of the day, trying to allay the apprehensions and discomforts of the new class of gramophone listener that such an activity as solo listening was not as outré and mortifying as all that, and might even have its admirable aspects.

Another disconcerting possibility of the new machine was that one could choose to listen to a piece of music at any time of the day. One could finish breakfast, read the paper and then listen to music, in the morning! Well! It simply wasn’t done. It smacked of decadence, and eccentricity, and the world gone all topsy-turvy—which, of course, it had.

Consider now that our basic social model for listening to music these days is of one person alone, with earphones on, with their own private play-list of individually selected music—music that others couldn’t hear even if they were in the same room. This means we have totally inverted the expected social positioning of music in the 80-odd years since the use of the gramophone became widespread. Music has gone from being a necessarily public experience, to a largely private one; from being something like attending the theater to being something like reading a book.

Well, so what? What difference does it really make how many other people are listening to the same piece at the same time as we are? After all, doesn’t the real event of the act of listening always take place within the heads of individuals, whether or not they sitting in a room alone or in a crowded concert hall?

The answer to this depends, of course, on what we think the “real event” of listening is. We have become so used to conceiving of ourselves as autonomous individuals and of society as no more than a common space for ourselves and other autonomous individuals—with no sensible demands of its own other than to provide freedom for people to live as they choose (with some basic laws thrown in for the protection of life and property). This is the real triumph of consumerist democracy, and in so many ways it is a good thing.

The story of the last 8o years has been the falling away—like the unnecessary rocket stages in a moon launch—of the constraints and demands of society. We can hardly imagine now the totality with which it governed people’s lives in earlier times. What one could wear or, say, how one could gesture, the people one could talk to, each and every moment was laced around with social codes that we have quite cheerfully chucked onto the ash-heap of history. These days, billionaires and indigents alike wear the same tracksuits, talk in the same happily inarticulate slang, watch the same TV shows and yes, listen to more or less the same music.

One of the results of this leveling of the cultural topography, it seems to me, is that the possible sign of music has been narrowed considerably to accommodate the essentially one-man/one-meaning aspect of commodity culture. Which is to say, we no longer much view music as a symbol or as an expression of communal values or social structure—much less as “progress.” The belief in a culture, wide evolution to a finer, more sophisticated state, has to be one of the most thoroughly dispensed with ideas in history. It simply couldn’t stand the trial of world wars, social science and Gilligan’s Island. These days, “progress” is every single person getting to act as close to they do in their own living room as often, and in as many places as possible, with no one raising a peep.

Music used to cause riots and herald social revolts. The Italians staged a revolution to Verdi’s music and a man was knifed at the premier of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder. Music could cause such intense reactions then because people believed that it actually contained within it the emotional core of all that was most significant about their society. With that belief, of course, came an enormous constraint, a stultifying conservatism that was a constant torment to artists well into the 20th century. Along with the torment, however, was a goad to profound expression: most of the great works of the 18th through early 20th century were formed in opposition to the forces of societal demands.

With the loss of social constraint came the loss of possible meanings for art. This is something seen recently in the Communist bloc countries where people used to memorize banned poems and risk imprisonment to hear forbidden music; but, after the political system liberalized, re-runs of Kojak and second-generation ABBA knock-offs suddenly seemed sufficient. It is one of the more perplexing aspects of human behavior that we need to be a bit miserable to appreciate beauty.

Truth be told I wouldn’t really want to go back to those times, even with the intensity and the profundity they inspired—at least, most the time I wouldn’t. I love stepping off into that private world of my own little musical kingdom as much as anybody. And, as a culture, I would wager that we generate more happiness hours (or at least contentedness hours) per individual than any in history. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that something hasn’t been irrevocably lost in getting rid of all that social super-structure. Something was lost, too, when the first gramophone user closed the door and softly, discretely, hungrily, set the needle into the groove.

Ask the average man (or woman) on the street to describe classical music, and you will probably hear that it’s soothing and peaceful. As any listener knows, however, classical music can be not only calming but also invigorating or even terrifying. Since Halloween is coming up, we’re going to look at some of the spookiest classical music out there.

Compared to such Christian holidays as Christmas or Easter, very little classical music was actually written with Halloween in mind. Part of the reason is that the holiday (which originated as the pagan feast Samhain) was celebrated primarily in Ireland and Scotland until the nineteenth century. Then it spread to other English-speaking countries, reaching mainland Europe only in the late twentieth century. Since almost all of the classical composers we know best today came from continental Europe and lived before the twentieth century, there is little Halloween music as such in the classical repertoire.

What we do have are some disturbing pieces of music associated with death, demons, ghosts, and the like. Probably the oldest piece of scary music around is the Dies Irae chant, part of the Catholic mass for the dead. Not only is the Dies Irae frightening on its own, but many composers who wanted to evoke terror also used it as part of other works. Prime examples are the hair-raising fifth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (which depicts a witches’ Sabbath), Saint-Saens’s Danse macabre, and Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of the Dead).

Other classical works with the power to terrify include the many musical versions of the Faust legend. This timeless tale, which revolves around the age-old idea of selling one’s soul to the devil, was popularized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and set by several composers, including Berlioz (La damnation de Faust, 1846), Gounod (Faust, 1859), and Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele, 1868). It’s not a coincidence that these works all come from the nineteenth century, as Romantic composers and artists were obsessed with death and the supernatural. Perhaps the most frightening setting of the story, however, comes from the twentieth century: Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata “Seid nüchtern und wachet” will petrify any listener.

Two other popular operatic subjects, the Orpheus myth and the story of Don Juan, also offer some Halloween-appropriate moments. Orpheus has to descend to the underworld to rescue his beloved Eurydice, and Don Juan gets dragged off to hell when he refuses to repent of his womanizing ways. As far as spine-tingling music goes, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice stands out on account of the opening of Act II and the Dance of the Furies (cannibalized by Gluck from his balletic version of the Don Juan story). And one of opera’s most frightening scenes occurs at the end of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Make sure to pick up a recording with a baritone who isn’t afraid to scream! (I recommend Thomas Allen in the 1984 EMI recording conducted by Bernard Haitink.)

Of course, there are other scary classical works unconnected to any of these stories. The Toccata and Fugue in D minor, long attributed to Bach, is a perennial haunted-house favorite. Other contenders include the Wolf’s Glen scene from Weber’s opera Der Freischütz and “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. In the realm of song, Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig” (The Erlking) and “Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the Maiden) are unmatched for their fright potential.

Thanks to B-grade horror flicks of the 1950s and 1960s, atonal and twelve-tone music has become synonymous with terror in the minds of many listeners. With such pieces as the one-act drama Erwartung and the song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg shows how the association came about. Not to be outdone, his pupil Berg wrote the supremely disturbing operas Wozzeck and Lulu. More recently, George Crumb’s quartet Black Angels would undoubtedly make a perfect horror-film soundtrack. (Listen for the reference to Schubert’s “Tod und das Mädchen.”) So turn off the lights, turn on the CD player, and give yourself a scare.

If I were to use the phrase “music and technology,” what would probably come to mind is a modern recording studio with banks of expensive looking electronics and of course the mammoth recording console—lots of lights and meters and computer screens. Indeed, we have a tendency to associate “technology” with whatever is the most sophisticated machinery of our own time and to think that all previous machines have somehow always been antiquated. If you don’t believe me rent a movie from the early nineties. The actors seem only marginally different from our current world—perhaps an unfortunate haircut or clothing choice—and then you see a computer or a cell phone: Oh my God, how did they (we) use those things??!!

These days, changes in technology have a way of making even the fashion world look stately and hide-bound. So it is understandable that we tend not consider technology’s impact on anything so securely in the past as classical music—after all that’s why it’s classical, isn’t it? They didn’t even have technology then … whenever “then” was exactly, did they?

Well, let’s consider. We typically divide up the long history of Western classical music into “style periods” – Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern – and we have a battery of characteristics to define how all these eras differed from one another and the socio-economic determinants that went into creating the eras, and it all works well enough that for the most part we don’t question it too much. I would like to propose, as a kind of a thought experiment, an alternate division—one made up of two different kinds of technological changes and the effects they had on music. Let’s start with the way in which music can be saved and propagated.

Most of the music ever created is gone—totally lost the moment it was made because there was no means of recording it. The sounds of all those solemn rituals, ecstatic country fairs, inspired jam sessions and solitary late-night noodlings have simply vanished as if they never existed. The only music that is known (and it must surely be a miniscule proportion of the whole, though it is indeed vast in itself) is recorded music. And by “recorded,” I don’t of course mean “recorded on magnetic tape or into digital form,” but simply stored in some medium so that it can be re-created. Prior to around1880 this meant notation.

After all, what is notation—the inscribing of paper (itself originally a pretty sophisticated technology) with a set of standardized symbols for the storage of a piece of otherwise ephemeral and abstract successions of sounds—other than a complex and hugely valuable technology? Notation created at a stroke (or series of strokes; it took a while to establish a standard method) the first “permanent” music; that is, music that was not reliant on human memory for its existence. This in turn led directly to the art and craft of composition. Without the ability to write down one’s music or to copy, study and learn from the music of others, the art of composition would be as hobbled as the art of painting without durable paints and a long-lasting surface on which to paint.

The first era of notated music, which we might call the hand-written era, encompasses all the works of Europe that were considered important enough to justify the time, expense and effort to write down from the Dark Ages to some time in the mid 1700’s. This, of course, means music for the Church, where it was part of the unifying liturgical glue that held together the disparate and polyglot nations of Christianity, and music of the courts, whose rulers could afford to pay specialists to compose music for them as they did could pay for food-tasters and master falconers. This era stretches from the Dark Ages all the way through to Bach’s day; even though music printing had existed for some time, he was still obliged to copy Vivaldi’s works by hand for further study.

The notated, or literate era was kicked into overdrive along with all other forms of written communication with the advent of the printing press. Engraving and the establishment of commercial publishing houses, in full swing by the end of the 18th century, led directly to the great flowering of musical development in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Scores became almost immediately available on publication from one end of Europe (and later the Americas) to the other. This immediacy of access was responsible for the intense cross-fertilization of the music that we see in the early Romantics, with Schumann eagerly reviewing each new work of Chopin’s as it was published, and Liszt transcribing and performing un-staged operas by Berlioz and Wagner, and so forth.

This musical era, which lasted until the practice of recording allowed for the propagation of non-literate music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, basically corresponds to what we still consider the “standard repertoire” of classical music. The advent of recording was in many ways as epochal an event as the invention of notation itself. Indeed it is a kind of “unwritten notation” in that it allowed for musically illiterate composers and performers to create fixed, and therefore transmittable, knowable artistic statements. Thus, at the simple stroke of a stylus, “music” went from that which could be written down, to that which could be played—an increase in quantity of many thousand-fold.

Further technological refinements—the long-playing disc, recording tape, multi-tracking, digitization—have, over the last century, allowed “illiterate” music to develop a scale, level of sophistication and degree of refinement that previously required the individual genius of a master composer and the extensive training of a professional orchestra to achieve.

When looked at through the lens of the technology of reproduction, the many various “styles periods’ and “genres” into which music history is usually separated, becomes a much simpler and more coherent matter. It also removes from our conception the role of technology as a trivial add-on to the autonomous art of music. Music, in this sense is whatever technology allows it to be.

Pop open a jewel box and pry out a CD—say it’s a recent recording of Mozart String Quartets—and stop for a moment before you hit “play” to consider how strange a thing it is that’s about to happen. Music will flood into your room. If you closed your eyes and held your nose, tried to forget the feel of the clothes on your body or the chair that you sit in, the experience you will have is, adjusting for particularities of performance, exactly the same experience you would have had at any of the thousands of other enactments of these pieces stretching all the way back to 1780-something, when the first might have included Mozart and Hadyn on violin or viola.

Think also of all the other human beings between that time and yours and how they too heard these same notes in the same succession as you are about to. This experience—repeated so many times in so many circumstances—the “Mozart String Quartet” experience, is a kind of museum of human consciousness. A half hour slice of time shared with thousands upon thousands of people you will never know, but along with whom you have sat and heard this music. An experience shared, even though no other event nor any other object might exist in common between you and random fellow audients: an Italian leather merchant from 1822, a Brazilian industrialist from 1890, a poet in pre-Revolutionary Shiang Hai, and a young music appreciation student in Indianapolis in 1953—all of you utterly different and separate from one another—except for the Mozart. It is, as I’ve said, a strange thing.

I called music a museum of consciousness and it’s worth remarking on, this similarity of (specifically “classical”) music and the institution of the museum. They have the same sense of collecting and preserving the best of the ages, of providing continuity and a pivot point of sorts around which the fluctuations of culture and history can turn. They also share, perhaps because of this role, a kind of reverence and awe, a feeling of vanished perfection. Yet there is a subtle distinction. In looking at a painting, or artifact one is always aware of the distance in time your own life has from the thing you are looking at—top hats on the men, plumes, people riding horses, etc. You are always aware that the people represented by the objects in a museum are ultimately and unbridgeably separate from your own existence.

In the act of listening, however, there is no way to feel the joy of Mozart as old joy, or someone else’s joy. It's yours; you feel it live, in real time—just as every other person who has experienced the same piece has felt it. This makes music personal, individual and yet, as we have seen, communal in a way that anything so specific and situated in its own time as a painting or pottery shard cannot ever match. Music has more in common with a séance or a time machine. It is as though the air of Vienna in 1787, with all its attributes—smells of wig powder, body odor, floor polish, animal glues, horse manure, snuff, sunlight through coal smoke, pollen from plants no longer growing—were sealed up in a room: an ambered slice of actual existence which we can, for a little while, inhabit as if it were our own. With music, we are as close to being there, in that time, as we can be in life.

So as you hit play, and the music floods the room, give some thought to this miracle, this distillation of the world as it should be, this intimate communion with the minds of people dead many decades, gone and yet as alive and close to us as if they were sitting in the chair next to us, because its our best inheritance, and one of the few causes for real hope. Then stop thinking of all that, and listen.

Every culture finds the geniuses it needs. The various cultures that have developed in Western Europe and America in the long years since the French Revolution have, whatever else their differences, largely agreed on at least a couple of musical geniuses. That the nature of these two men’s lives and abilities also form a neatly matching pair of opposing attributes says more, surely, of our need for clear and uncomplicated models than it does about the actual natures of Mozart and Beethoven, or their music.

Put simply Mozart has come to stand for effortless ease and otherworldly perfection, inborn and unexplainable. Beethoven, for the ability, through struggle and the intensity of one’s own desire and will, to triumph over all adversity. These identities have been fixed for a long while and have served as a large part of the foundational legend of what has become “classical music.” It’s not that they are invented exactly: Mozart did often seem to be able to write inexhaustibly graceful and inventive music more or less at will. Beethoven, as is well documented in his sketchbooks, did seem to wrest his titanic works out of the void with only long and strenuous effort.

But, for many, these characterizations of the artistic personalities of Mozart and Beethoven have become so inseparably linked with their actual pieces, that the one seems to transmit the other as a kind of parable or model for how one might, or should aspire to, meet their own life. So powerful has this effect been—like a secular “Lives of the Saints” (one that is taken in emotionally)—that in many ways it has tended to distort something in our perceptions of these two artists.

We have all, I suppose, had the experience of someone forming an opinion of us: “you are such a snob,” “you’re so good with machinery,” “you don’t worry about anything do you?” and so forth. These people, even if they are quite close to us, will often stick to their opinions regardless of any contrary evidence; they simply see us through the lens of their opinion, no matter what we may actually do. Of course their opinion, and their unwillingness to change it, is more a function their own sense of themselves than of us. They aren’t really talking about us at all, but rather a distorted image of themselves or of their own worst fears or strongest desires.

So, the fact that the identities assigned to Mozart and Beethoven do not always find correspondences in the lives and work of the actual men—Mozart sweated out some pieces for which he had greater ambitions, and some works came to Beethoven with an apparent (almost Mozartean) ease—ultimately has proven to be less important in the larger scheme of things than keeping the symbolic roles of these two founding heroes clear.

For what is our idea of the artistic genius but a modern hero? The old heroes, like Theseus, Hercules, Odysseus and the rest, served to incorporate for their cultures particular virtues—bravery, cunning, persistence, the favor of the gods—that were particularly difficult to attain and therefore of particular value, to the (at least the free male) members of the culture that venerated the tales of their deeds. Mozart and Beethoven then, heroes to the age of precarious universal individuality, are as important as heroes as they are as composers of music. This is why it is always the lightest of Mozart (Eine Kleine Nacht Musik) and the stormiest of Beethoven (the 5th or 9th Symphony), which are used whenever “classical” music is referenced in the larger culture. What is important is not the actual music, but rather the individual virtues these pieces symbolize.

Given all this, the fact that the mythic sagas of our two heroes—“Mozart could compose and perform at age 6, Beethoven went deaf but still wrote music!”—are also common cultural currency and are often some of the only facts that people not otherwise interested in classical music know about the subject is not, therefore, so surprising. Nor is it surprising that poor Hadyn, though he largely created the language that Mozart and Beethoven used, is so often an afterthought. He simply has no heroic profile (other than outlasting a bad marriage and a grinding low-status job) with which to serve as a model for the rest of us.

I don’t think this is all necessarily such a bad thing. We need our heroes. When confronted with personal crises, we need to feel that triumph is possible, or that grace, humor and wit are enough to see us through whatever ridiculous scenario life might cook up. If Mozart and Beethoven can serve as our spiritual training wheels as well as our greatest composers, well then bless them. And bless us for having such good taste.

“Well, how did I get here?”

Many of you recognize this as a quote from the Talking Heads song, "Once In A Lifetime." The Talking Heads was a rock band and if you are puzzled to find rock lyrics kicking off an op/ed on a classical music website, you’re not alone.

As I sat down to write this column, I searched for something to say, a question to ask, a point to make, but words did not appear. I needed to think and I couldn’t get this 20-year-old lyric out of my head. Like Poe’s raven it kept repeating its answer to my one question.

“What am I going to write?”

“Well, how did I get here?”

And the deadline drew near.

The brain is a funny thing and it likes to have its own way. “Oh I am sorry, brain, let me drop everything so we can deal with your agenda.” And so I did give in just to see what the gray matter was up to. Maybe the old fellow was actually trying to pitch in this time. By gum, maybe a retrospective is just the ticket. A nod to the past before pushing headlong into the future. Right. This could work. All I needed to do was ask the question.

OK? How did I get here?

I started a mental rewind through my life. (Stop. Adjust the volume.) And then I saw them. There they all were and in no particular order. Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments that day on Constance Street; Back in Black in seventh grade; Joe’s Garage in the summer of ’88; the "Waldstein"—first movement, Mahler, 1st Symphony and so on…all the music that ever held me spellbound, transfixed, captivated. Too many pieces to count, but I recognized each one to the last.

If you are like me, getting hooked on a new song, or symphony, or sonata—or at times just a single movement—is a moment of rapture that stretches across time. You live with your newfound musical pal. You listen at home, getting ready for work, in the car, working out.

You wear your musical discovery on your sleeve. You forge alliances with other fans you meet, and together you swear it’s the greatest music anyone will ever hear. You sing along at the top of your lungs. Play. Repeat. Play. Repeat. Play. Repeat.

For days these notes become the unifying theme in your life. And then they aren’t. You’ve moved on. The romance has evolved into a staid and solid marriage with a partner you can always count on when you need to be reminded of your capacity to love.

Those moments—those unbelievably incomprehensible, indescribable, life affirming slices of time when we are owned by a piece of music—are the reason we all listen. And they are the reason that I am here. Early on something in me decided that this music stuff needed to be explored (it was a unanimous vote although I don’t remember casting one).

Admittedly, my solution was a bit extreme. But I am pretty certain I’m not the only guy who let something like an infatuation with Led Zeppelin escalate into doctoral studies and student debt equaling the entire take of the Madison Square Garden box office for Zeppelin’s concert in ’73.

The old gray matter was way ahead of me this time. My love for classical music evolved out of my love for rock music, including the Talking Heads. For me the Talking Heads, Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Hank Williams and Stravinsky are all equals inasmuch as they have all given me those moments. In the big picture it makes no difference to me where that feeling is coming from, how I found it, or where it leads me next. It’s all humanly organized sound.

Sometimes the journey of discovery is circuitous. I take comfort in that.