Article on Music Appreciation by Juilliard Student

College Majors Music Major
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<p>Again, this article was written by a young person studying violin and I don’t think it pretends to be sophisticated.</p>

<p>I think that ideally young composers write what they have an internal need to write, regardless of accessibility or audience preferences or academic orthodoxy or whatever else constitutes an external influence. The pressure to excel at as young an age as possible is what I regret: savoring student status, whether in school or out, while exploring one’s “voice” is a wonderful luxury that I would wish for all young composers.</p>

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<p>I’ve been very pleased that my son has received a lot of support from composition teahers who write music themselves that is very different from his.</p>

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<p>The article was for a general readership in a large daily paper. It’s not about composition, it’s about being receptive as a listener. </p>

<p>As compmom says, there are no pretensions of sophistication. The writer received a deluge of positive email from readers of the newspaper asking for her annotated playlist.</p>

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<p>Hunt, have you seen the book “Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time”? Great book that you and your son might enjoy.</p>

<p>" Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves—or hates —classical music. " (Amazon review)</p>

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Well, I didn’t send her an e-mail attacking her, nor would I. I was particularly taken by the image of locking somebody up and making them listen to Debussy. I couldn’t help thinking about whether locking somebody up with other music would make them like it or not–which is how Wozzeck came into it.</p>

<p>compmom, I think we have a copy of that invective book. I love stuff like that.</p>

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<p>“I was particularly taken by the image of locking somebody up and making them listen to Debussy”</p>

<p>I was too. Scenes from Zero Dark Thirty came to mind.</p>

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<p>I happen to think that Einstein on the Beach is brilliant. Everytime I listen to it, I hear something I hadn’t noticed before. Modern music is to be explored, not just listened to. Yes, some work is required of the listener.</p>

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<p>The author of the article wants to share her passion and love for classical music with her friends. I just don’t think there’s any better advocate for new or old classical music than that. If someone you admire gets really excited about something, and helps you hear/see/feel/understand that something that they love so much - isn’t that what your best teachers have done for you - whether they’re your family, your friends, co-workers or professors? The author’s pleasure in the music, and desire to share, it’s infectious - that’s why folks want her listening list. They’re asking her for a way in to that experience for themselves.</p>

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<p>There is no doubt critics and others took their shots at composers, George Bernard Shaw worked as a music critic, and was a partisan of Wagner, and wrote horrendous comments about Brahm’s music (Tchaikovsky simply called him an untalented SOB). There was a viennese critic who called tchaikovsky’s violin concerto basically a pile of Russian fluff. </p>

<p>The rite of spring is interesting, supposedly Saint Saens walked out of it…but there is also a lot of evidence that ‘the riots’ and such were staged by Dhagliev as a publicity stunt (and that the ballet was a lot more controversial than the music, which I can understand, I saw a restaging of it, holy crap was it bad…MST 3000 would love it)…within 10 years, it was in constant play, though. </p>

<p>Beethoven had trouble with his music, the late string quartets, even the latter symphonies, some of his piano music, yet within 20 years of his death, he had become the kind of icon we see today…On the other hand, bach was kind of forgotten as an “old fart”, I guess one of Charles Wourinam’s ancestors was in the next wave, and it took almost 100 years after his death for him to be revived…not because it was ‘avant garde’, but because it was old fashioned supposedly. </p>

<p>It can take time for music to catch on, Bizet’s carmen was considered a flop when it first came out…</p>

<p>Phillip Glass and John Adams are interesting, and as time has gone on their pieces have gotten a lot more interesting, because both of them have moved away from the rigid orthodoxy that in some ways they were both guilty of (could be what one person said of Mendelsohn, when he wrote his Octet at 16,. ‘the arrogance of youth’), and modern pieces that are standing up to time tend to be ones that aren’t rigidly adhering to anything. I saw John Adam’s conduct his “son of symphony” piece in LA, and I don’t know what was better, the piece or watching him conduct (he doesn’t conducts, he kind of dances <em>lol</em>). </p>

<p>As far as doing work to appreciate a piece, I think there is a line there, and it is part of the problem with Schoenberg and his disciples, for example, where the music is based in abstract mathematical concepts, and to appreciate it you almost have to analyze the structure. Reminds me of my favorite line of music, when in “Jazz” Ken Burns had Branford Marsalis commenting on Cecil Taylor (avant garde jazz pianist) who made the statement that he expected his audiences to do their homework before coming to one of his concerts, to which Mr. Marsalis said “That’s #<em>$%&(</em>#! That is like saying if I want to go watch the Yankees, I have to take infield practice”…and it raises a real question, if a piece takes that kind of understanding to appreciate it, how many people are willing to sit and listen to it enough to discern all the complexiities? Milton Babbit famously said in an interview he didn’t care if anyone listened to his music, but there is kind of a philosophical point there, sort of like the old argument if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, if someone writes a piece of music and no one wants to listen to it, is it really a piece of music? After all, music is about the audiences, about the composer writing it, the musicians playing it and the audience hearing it, and the audience is the 3rd leg of the stool so to speak. </p>

<p>On a less philosophical bent, there is a video on you tube of a conversation between Milton Babbit and David Diamond, that was done years ago, and it went pretty much as you can imagine, Babbitt was arguing that we needed more academic oriented music, that the future was in expanding the bounds of the music, tearing it apart, creating new paradigms, and Diamond in effect argued the opposite, that academic music is a case of doing things simply to do them, without thinking about just what is it as a composer we are trying to do? Is music for the composer to amuse themselves, to take things where there curiousity lies, or is it to move people, take them to a different place? (I am doing this from memory, so that is not verbatim). </p>

<p>I read a quote once, supposedly Mozart said it, and he said that his goal in writing a piece of music was something that audiences could listen to and enjoy, but that at the same time was stretching them, making them think, often without even being aware of it, and that if he could do that, he would consider it a success personally. </p>

<p>In terms of the article, it is someone who loves the music and is trying to get others experience her passion and get curious enough to look it up. I think the line about Debussy was not meant to be taken as seriously as some are taking it, I think simply she was expressing frustration at getting people even to take the time to listen to it, they were so scared of it (and if their introduction to classical music was Wozzeck or lulu, would take a bank vault door to hold them IMO). </p>

<p>I think there is room for people to appreciate the music, musical purists make fun of people like David Garret, some of them make fun of the fact that Nigel Kennedy sold 3 million copies of his recording of the 4 seasons, some of them went ballistic when on the UK 'Britains Got Talent" when the guy who was the mobile phone salesman won singing an aria because he loved opera, or knocked the You Tube symphony concept because it ‘wasn’t a real orchestra’, forgetting that in any of those cases, it is building bridges to people go get into the music. The You Tube symphony wasn’t trying to be another Berlin Philharmonic (and hey, the Berlin Phil started as a beer hall band!), rather it was trying to show you could make music that isn’t ‘perfect’ or ‘fully professional’ and have it mean something…the snobs are saying that music should be only for those who can play it perfectly, or who can understand “true” music (i.e what the experts/gatekeepers/critics say it is)…</p>

<p>Reminds me of a story I think Oliver Sachs related in one of his books, an anthropologist was living with and studying an African tribe, and they wanted him to be part of what they were doing, and they had a gathering/celebration, and they wanted him to sing, and he kept saying he couldn’t sing, and they couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t grasp it, they asked him if he had been sick or something, and when said he couldn’t sing well, that he didn’t sing that sounded good, they felt sad for him,because to them it didn’t matter, it was important to do music…same thing, maybe part of the answer is convincing people that it doesn’t have to be this rarified form played in concert halls…I saw Daniel Hope with his sonata Partner at Joe’s Pub several years ago in NYC, and it was an amazing night, they did great music, and the audience was not mostly a classical music audience (for one, they were mostly in their 20’s and 30’s), and they were enjoyable, because the talked to the audience, explained what they were playing, and also made some horrible jokes <em>lol</em>.</p>

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That’s an interesting analogy–have you ever been to a baseball game with somebody who knows nothing about baseball? Unless there’s somebody willing and able to explain it, it’s nonsensical and extremely boring (it can be pretty boring even if you do understand it). We were watching cricket on TV recently (briefly), and it made no sense to me. I think for a lot of music, we’ve done our “homework” without thinking about it too much–the sounds of Western music are in our ears already. Obviously, that’s not true for Schoenberg’s music. One issue, I guess, is whether there is some music that is difficult to enjoy even if you do know a lot about it.</p>

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<p>The analogy isn’t perfect, with baseball or any sport you have to know the basic rules, otherwise it is a bunch of guys running around on the field seemingly doing weird things. </p>

<p>With traditional classical music before the 12 Tone and severely atonal ‘revolution’ came about, there aren’t rules you need to understand, you can sit and listen to a symphony or a chamber piece and be touched by the sound of it. You don’t have to understand that Beethoven in a particular piece made one section in B minor because it was the natural minor of the original major key, you don’t need to know any of that to sit and listen and say “wow”. You can listen to “The Rite of Spring” and appreciate it for the sound of it, without knowing the rythmic gymanstics he used in creating that sound. Studies on romantic, baroque and classical pieces, as compared to what atonal music or ‘harsh’ music, using MRI’s have shown that people’s brains react differently, and it isn’t just ‘cultural understanding’ involved, there are physical differences (the book "your brain on music’ talks a lot about this). Aaron Copeland in his book "Listening to Music said you can listen to music on a sensual level, without understanding the underlying stuff, and he is correct IMO. You can listen to Mahler 4 without knowing that a certain section reflects death, you don’t need to know that Strauss in Ein Heidenleiben in one section is promoting himself as the hero to listen to it and enjoy it. Obviously, if you read the program notes you gain an understanding of what the composer was trying to say, but you don’t need it to appreciate it on some level or appreciate or like it. </p>

<p>On the other hand, you listen to a Second Viennese school piece, or an atonal piece, and the reaction on a sensual level is to not like it. The problem with Schoenberg and his disciples was they made music into an academic form, where in a sense the ‘form’ became the understanding, so to understand it you would need to delve down into the theory and structure to understand it, the structure in effect became the music, and that is what Branford Marsalis was talking about, that if you so remove the experience of music from the sound of it, and make it all about the form, you are losing a lot.</p>

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<p>This article really spoke to me. I have moments where I feel immense sadness for people who have never heard, say, the third movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto or the Bach Chaconne or whatever. (Although locking people in a closet never occurred to me! :))</p>

<p>I grew up in a household that valued music of all kinds, and I was encouraged to engage with the music from an early age. (There’s a Swedish children’s picture book that I still associate with Wanda Landowska’s Bach Inventions since age 3.) I’m looking forward to hearing the Bach Cello Suites performed in a beautiful church in Paris when I chaperone a school trip this summer, and I’m disappointed that neither student nor chaperone shares my enthusiasm. </p>

<p>Last year, the place where I work held a “cocktail hour” type event and the secretary - who prefers 1980s and beyond popular music - asked me to bring in a “classy classical” CD that could be played in the background. I interpreted her request as meaning Haydn Quartets, and that apparently was the perfect match.</p>

<p>Would I have brought in Wozzeck? Obviously not. </p>

<p>I think the important message here is that the introduction to classical music - as to many “scary” new things - needs to be personal. D3 has a good friend who enjoys baseball; he has quietly introduced her to many details about the game and she has, in return, suggested a piece or two for him to listen to…both have grown. She has watched him play in a game and he came to her senior recital. In both cases, the door has been opened.</p>

<p>As a side note: I’m impressed that a Juilliard student (a) has the time to write an article for the paper, and (b) possesses the skill set to do so. :stuck_out_tongue: to all those people who criticize the arts!</p>

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<p>I remember being so happy when my daughter told me, in her first semester as a music major, that her music history teacher said that he was always “weak at the knees” hearing the 15th century music played in class (Josquin Des Prez I think). I figured she was in good hands.</p>