Classical Music as an idea

 

Have you ever revisited old TV shows you watched as a kid? It’s a very odd feeling. The jokes and animations that made you giggle when you were younger suddenly make you feel a little uncomfortable. Some of the dialogue now comes off as creepy adult innuendos and inside jokes that only more mature (or immature…) people would write.

 

The other day, I decided to look at some books that I read when I was young. I’m talking about the classics: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Goodnight Moon, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It was…weird. I dunno. There’s something about an anthropomorphic mouse asking for food and shelter that touched my surrealist funny bone. But there was a charm to it. Maybe it was the artwork. Or the dialogue. Maybe it was the idea that the mouse and little boy are now trapped in a separate timeline where the cycle of cookie-giving and cookie-receiving will never end, and their existential captivity gave me some existential relief. 

 

The point is beyond plot devices here. These are books that I remembered. Think about all of the children’s books that were read to you as a kid that weren’t memorable. Can’t think of them? It’s because you forgot! Do you feel bad? I don’t think you should. They just weren’t intended to be memorable, is all.

 

It’s an often heard criticism of classical music that it’s only known for a few pieces that even the most unfamiliar consumer could identify. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker music, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. They’ve become commercial jingles and living tropes of what classical music represents…but oddly, I’m not bothered by it. Many days I hear a colleague or musician friend of mine complaining about how people don’t want to study the “intricacies” of classical music. They want the world to admire the pieces that they play and the instruments that they pay for. Underrepresented composers and styles have seen a surge lately on the concert stage, and our own University of Michigan has made it a point to program a high number of BIPOC composers for the university performances this year, while simultaneously programming pieces that are “classics”, or at the very least have the same age as the real classics. 

 

 

This dichotomy has persisted in the classical genre of music since its birth. Incorporating the old into the new. Every composer and every artist has taken inspiration from the past, and they make little attempt at concealing it. Stravinsky used Russian folk tales, songs and traditional music forms for a large part of his works. Bach built on the contrapuntal methods of his predecessors and perfected the fugue format. Beethoven took inspiration from Mozart, who took inspiration from Haydn, who so-on-and-so-forth. And that’s kind of where people think it stops.

 

But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a plethora of new composers that are doing insane things. Commercials will play Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” with the cannons and brass fanfares, but they won’t play Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices”, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto is one of the most performed solo pieces and is a crowd favorite, and yet Arvo Part’s “Fratres” for solo violin is not only far more of a spectacle, but connects with the modern ear in a way that many of the great and late composers could not achieve. The modern repertoire is expanding in such a manner that it’s overwhelming to even document everything that’s happening. For centuries, the only few solos for my own instrument, the trombone, were limited to a few pieces from the classical period that follow the standard form of any classical concerto. The solo repertoire now looks completely different, such as the concerto from American composer Christopher Rouse, which was so profound that it won him the Pulitzer Prize. These are not pieces that the public generally wants to hear, however. I absolutely adore the Rouse Trombone Concerto, but that’s because I have a special connection with the solo instrument. The sounds of Rouse don’t necessarily resonate with the public. 

 

That’s not to say that Rouse is a lesser-than composer. Quite the contrary, in fact. He’s an amazing composer. So why doesn’t the public want to support the arts to keep people like him in our cultural breadth? Because he’s not Beethoven 5. Or Mozart’s “Magic Flute”. Really, I think it’s because he’s a relatively new composer. Not every big name classical composer made it big in their lifetimes. Charles Ives, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, was hardly performed during his lifetime. In fact, music wasn’t even his source of income; Ives worked at an insurance company while writing music in his spare time. His oeuvre was so ahead of its time that it didn’t really mesh well with the other big name composers being performed. And now, long after his death, he’s lauded as a genius.

 

Classical music is just that: music. It’s an edifice of the human spirit, replacing what words cannot adequately express. Classical music is the preservation of that humanity, just in a different form than other kinds of music. Nirvana, Beethoven, Daft Punk; they’re not very different from each other. They all manipulate sounds to express a core sparkle of their humanity. Classical music preserves the forms and mediums of how music used to always be expressed, which is why it’s usually heard through either a piano or an orchestra. Pieces such as Beethoven’s 5th Symphony are so widely performed for centuries because the spirit in them is so strong that an entire world can resonate with it. Despite being more abstract and less explicit than other kinds of music, practically everyone can appreciate the beginning ostinato of the symphony, outlining the harsh and dictatorial character of its key, C minor. There’s no lyrics to instruct the audience on exactly what Beethoven is trying to say. All they can do is observe the dynamic nature of the orchestra and absorb themselves into the music.

 

Another core element of classical music is what I believe to be an innate hierarchy. While other modes of music have a very direct relationship with the audience and the listener, classical music (particularly classical music culture) functions on varying degrees of authority and, dare I say, subservience. The concertgoers are somewhere towards the bottom, expected to sit silently for hours on end and pay absolute attention to the performers. If you’ve ever been to a classical concert you’ll know exactly what I mean. Fancy dress code, no phones, no applause or cheering until the end. Silence is the only acceptable sound to come from the seats. Next would probably be the event organizers. These are the people that genuinely have compassion for the arts and want to be involved in some bureaucratic way, so they shift their efforts into facilitating the production and preservation of the music making process. 

For the musicians, the hierarchy is painfully obvious in the workplace. The performers are at the bottom, and are bound by the words of the conductor. The conductor, then, is bound by the directions of the composers of the pieces they are performing. So, the hierarchy looks something like this:

 

Audience —--> Arts Administration —---> Performers —---> Conductor —----> Composer

 

Now, one could probably look at this and conclude that it’s some byproduct of capitalism. If there are people that are earning more money than others in a workplace, then it easily stands that these people have more power than those that earn less than them, regardless of if their work justifies the discrepancies in salaries. Although, as the piece entitled “Classical Music as a Practice” describes, money is certainly not one of the most stable themes in the industry of classical music. Money aside, however, I think that this hierarchy would remain consistent not necessarily because of the surrounding material environment, but because of an idea that persists through classical music to the very core; the belief that there are differing qualities in sound, and that those sounds should be given precedence over other sounds.

 

It sounds kind of arbitrary, I know. Sound is sound. What difference would it make what gets played on stage? Well, to the people musicians often lament for not having mature and developed ears, the audience, they seem to have a good idea on what they want to hear. In every calendar for every major orchestra, one can find patterns of pieces over the years; Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, etcetera. Wagner, Schumann, Mozart. Even despite a large degree of variance between these pieces, they share the exact same thing; they are not just being performed, they are being preserved. 

One of the most frequent criticisms of Western classical music is that it’s essentially a dead white guys club for Western nationalists. I get it. All of the most performed pieces are by white male composers, and there’s centuries worth of discrimination within classical music, as recent years has seen the overdue celebration of minority composers that wrote incredible music, such as the black composers Florence Price and George Walker. It’s certainly not a good look for a culture behind one kind of music. There’s a multitude of reasons for why it has this kind of look, racism and classism towards the top of the reasons, and it does reflect a colonial mindset when the music reflects a strict adherence to a white Western narrative. 

 

There is something more I would like to investigate, however, as there is a complex contradiction that exists here. Although all of the composers mentioned hitherto represent our culture in a stationary manner in how it exists now, the pieces also display other qualities. Rebellion. Progressivism. Triumph. Although most of the music isn’t very socially aware of how it fits into the broader scheme of world music, for the times that they were written in they were far beyond anything people could conceive of.

For these composers, their music represented something larger than life itself, and to those that take the time to become immersed in it it often means something similar to them. Some of them were, shall I say, less-than-savory people that certainly perpetuated some of these racist and classist hierarchies onto their music. Wagner, probably one of the most important composers in history, is famously known for his fiery anti-Semitism and highly public writings on race and German superiority. For Wagner, all art was equal to one another and should be combined into one great work, an idea easily represented in all of his operatic works. He wanted the audience to feel the weight of the whole world upon them whenever his art was performed. Mahler, a man of equal stature in the classical realm, famously said “tradition is not about worshiping ashes, but rather about preserving the fire”. These composers, despite the flawed system that they ultimately perpetuated, felt a deep fire that needed to be reverberated across the world for years after they died. 

 

I’m not trying  to suggest that classical music is always this nice little “fire” that Mahler is talking about. It’s rife with controversies, contradictions, competition and drama. Elitism plagues the classical community in many crevices, and when you’re surrounded by people that study it it’s hard not to give into the elitism. If I’m being honest, I like to indulge in the elitism. It makes me feel special. No, not just special - different. Unique, maybe. I don’t really know. It doesn’t make sense that having a preferred kind of music for recreation would make someone special. It’s no different than saying that pop, reggae, folk, or rap is your favorite kind of music. As long as you genuinely love it because it’s music, who cares? 

It goes back to what I was saying earlier. Classical music is always about hierarchies, and it begins with the proclamation that higher and lower pleasures exist within music. This statement itself has a long history with the colonialist mindset (John Stuart Mill comes to mind, in his saying that only a select few among us would be able to perceive the difference between higher and lower qualities of pleasure “noble savages” and lesser-than humans excluded), but I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here and say that there might be something to this idea. The exclusionary principles this implies will obviously shun a lot of people from engaging with beautiful classical music, and while I dislike that this occurs, I’m reticent on whether or not this is either a bad thing, or a really bad thing. If it was really bad, then I would say that this needs to be rectified with ASAP and put classical music on life support. 

 

If it’s just bad, however….

I’m really not sure what to make of it. I want as many people to appreciate this music as possible, not because I think it’s necessary to live a valuable life, but because I think it’s just really, really cool stuff. It’s bold and bordering arrogant to say that people would be more enriched by listening to classical music; after all, who are we to say that we have a true understanding of this stuff? We didn’t write it, and most of us haven’t spent a lot of time studying what music really means and how it serves us. While I love classical music, I understand that a lot of people don’t listen to it for a lot of reasons. Not everyone buys into the concept of preservation or finds value in it.