About Me and Classical Music

My experience of classical music is rooted in my childhood years (fidgeting through performances at Symphony Hall in the itchy black wool pants my parents made me wear for the occasion, the BSO being Church), and in influences as recent as NPR’s Facebook post “The Top 10 Classical Albums of The Year,” which demonstrates if nothing else that composers and performers of music for the concert hall have been busy, making up new things for us to listen to. It’s not all Mozart and Beethoven anymore. Actually, it hasn’t been for a while.

Yet the following scene is still typical:

The winter concert hall is warm and well-lit, and buzzing with small-talk among the concertgoers taking their seats, or searching for their seats, or already sitting in their seats, or in someone else’s seats, having disposed of their coats and scarves as well as they can, and peering now at the fine print in the program while the members of the orchestra assemble themselves onstage. The percussionists are trying out their timpani, the violas are practicing their peskiest parts, the trumpets are galloping up and down their scales, the bassoonist is doing a last-minute run-through of an especially tricky solo, sounding like a dove cooing to itself.

The concertmaster stands and plays the concert A, and the rest of the orchestra falls into line with an upwelling of coordinated sound, literally setting the stage for what’s to come. Now the conductor strides forward from the wings, smiling broadly. She or he steps smartly to the podium, bows to the orchestra, turns and bows to the audience, right, center, and left, as the audience applauds, although no one has done anything at this point to deserve it. Facing the orchestra again, the conductor now raises the baton, waits (sometimes for many moments) for silence to descend in the theater, and now the baton falls.

It seems a timeless ritual, like a religious service. If a male, the conductor is likely dressed in a customary outfit known as white tie, or some similar attire slightly more 21st-century. The orchestra members are wearing formal clothing too, with black, gray, and slices of white predominating. Why is this? Sometimes there are classical performances in which the orchestra is dressed in casual clothing, with no adverse effect on the quality of the music, except that musicians dressed informally seem to be enjoying themselves more. Certainly the days are past where the audience would also show up in stiff traditional attire, to take “their” seats. At one time, this code of dress may have been a sign of respect towards the esteemed maestro and musicians, and to the well-known pillars of the Western symphonic canon, most of them white male Europeans. Or perhaps it was a way of signaling that whatever changes might occur in the world outside the hall, the old standards of privilege, and the privileged, would be maintained within it.

In a way, we in the audience are part of the performance too. Our job is to sit and listen, to applaud when the time is right, to enter and exit on cue, and in general to pay up, keep quiet, and behave ourselves: no talking or eating or self-grooming while the program is underway, no standing up, no shouting, no throwing things, no taking pictures, no dancing around or rushing the stage, please please please won’t you kindly refrain from Just About Everything.

The whole classical/concert experience is full of signaling. When my father was inducted into the Army in 1943, they at first wanted to put him in the signal corps; they thought that he, as a violin player, would already comprehend how abstract symbols could convey explicit instructions. (For better or worse his pre-architecture training won out, and he was placed among the combat engineers instead.)

What else can we say about classical music? For one thing, when you experience it in person, it is unamplified. No microphones for the performers, no loudspeakers stacked on the stage, no mixing board. Traditionally, it is an acoustic music, relying on instruments played by hand, and not dependent on electronics. Everything is live. Pre-recorded music and sound effects are seldom utilized. Sometimes pipe organs or electric keyboards figure into performances, and they are dependent on an electric current and some form of mechanical assistance. Mostly, though, power is only required for lighting, heating, and ventilation.

Classical music is old school. Much of the repertoire has been around for over a century, and it is not going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Your Google news feed is not apt to tempt you with something like “Hot New Trends That’ll Change Your Mind About Symphonies.” Tradition here is strong. Hip and chic are not.

Classical music sounds expansive. It is meant to make an impression on you. It is meant to be a statement on the part of the composer and on the part of the performers. Classical music is often monumental, heroic-sounding, thrilling, thought-provoking, intelligent, demanding, requiring a commitment from you.

Classical music, in person, is a visual experience. You are watching music being made, by an ensemble of fairly ordinary-looking people, using devices that are constructed wholly or in part out of natural or handcrafted materials. The brasses glitter, the double basses shine, the bows of the violins rise and fall in rhythmic waves, the percussionist’s hovering, marshmallow-tipped mallets strike with precision, as they have for centuries. The conductor makes a choreography of the music, striking the time, gesticulating, stabbing, chopping, dragging the sound forth, in a strange, fixed-foot interpretive dance.

Classical music is planned music. With the exception of the soloists’ cadenzas, improvisation is not a factor in a performance. The composer’s score serves as the reliable map to guide the musicians through the maze. (I am always impressed with people who can pick up some sheet music, look at it, and begin to hum the melody or the harmony in the right tempo and the right key. Never could figure out how they did that. I am a slow reader in the English language to begin with, and a musical score is another language entirely, in which Latin letterforms are pushed to the margins. A typical score is a dizzying sight, and sometimes resembles dead carpenter ants flattened on the page.)

Classical music, if performed competently, is delivered to you complete and highly polished, with your 100% satisfaction in mind. Mostly, you only need to sit still and listen, though that can be more challenging than it sounds.

Classical music is virtually limitless and can lead you anywhere. In time, you could find yourself listening to something like the Ramayana monkey chant (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6EFGuXEowk).

Over the years, I learned to call the kind of classical music I enjoyed “programmatic.” You’re probably aware that this type of composition is intended evoke mental images of languid summer afternoons, or battles, or birdsong, or fauns, or the ocean, or thunderstorms. The kind of classical music that tended to put me to sleep is called “abstract.” Here, musical ideas are to be explored (and then explored some more, and then explored at even greater length), but you’ll only be reminded of birdsong by accident.

You can ignore classical music. Even if you like it, you can turn your back on it and walk away from it for a while, maybe a long while. If you don’t like it, if you consider it to be dull and square and stuffy and elitist, you can easily avoid it, and never have to experience it.

Classical music is serious. People take a scholarly approach to it. So, then, you have to know what you’re talking about if you undertake to discuss any aspect of it with someone. And you have to know not mispronounce the names of the performers, the compositions, or the composers and the cities they hail from. You have to expect to sit through music that you might find boring: lengthy works for solo piano, pieces for duos or trios or quartets or quintets or sextets or septets or octets or nonets that strike you as tedious, music without strong or memorable or hummable themes. Works from the 20th and 21st centuries that seem bizarre.

Then there is the ponderous music of Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Rachmaninoff, that you may find, after sampling it, learning a bit more about it, and finally sitting through some of it, to be exhausting, impenetrable, beyond your reach, a waste of your time.

So, here’s a suburban middle-of-the-road fella’s conception of classical music: give me Respighi, Sibelius, Copland, Mussorgsky, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky (even the chamber suite “L’Histoire du Soldat”; Stravinsky makes you listen.) And not so much your Mozart, your Haydn, Schubert, Schumann; they make me nod off at concerts. Give me Alan Hovhaness. Yes, him. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeXEP7VzQqo). And Arvo Pärt too, why not. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk)

At my college station, about a third of the programming over the course of any week was classical. During orgy period (the four weeks during winter and spring exams) the normal schedule would be suspended and the station would switch to all-day, all-night operation. Extended “orgies” of recorded music would be broadcast, and were intended to keep undergrads company as they stayed up very late and woke up very early to cram for exams and finish up those overdue term papers. There were rock and jazz and folk music orgies, but the memorable ones were the classical orgies. For example, there was, during my time, a 40-hour Mozart orgy (or was it 60?), during which no single work was played more than once. The DJ, or “orgiast,” attempted to one-man (that is, to do both the announcing and the engineering from the control room, where the recordings were put on the air; normally, a classical program would be staffed with one announcer and one engineer, who would do their work from two separate rooms, but this was exam time and staffing was thin); however, this staffer became incoherent after about 35 on-air hours straight, and subs had to be called in to finish the orgy. There was a 56-hour Tchaikovsky orgy, 48 hours of Bach, 50 hours of Beethoven.

I did several such orgies, starting with a four-hour Sibelius orgy. (Growing up in the home I did, you knew about Jean Sibelius. My parents had a turntable-amplifier system and a collection of maybe 75 LPs. My father would drop the tone arm on Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony and conduct the final movement, waving his arms around the living room with his eyes shut, and with special attention to the six separate emphatic chords that conclude the piece. I think Sibelius’ Fifth spoke to him of how an individual’s dauntless striving can help him overcome life’s impediments. Or something.) In the station library I had found a boxed set of all seven Sibelius symphonies recorded by the Japan Philharmonic under Akeo Watanabe. Several of them happened to be the shortest performances available, and I, thinking how this would enable me to squeeze more Sibelius into the time allowed, was going to play all seven by the Japan Phil, in order, interspersed with other works. It was a tidy plan but a silly one. Whatever the Japan Phil’s strengths, it was doubtful that theirs would be the best performances of every one of the symphonies. Before air time, the station program director suggested that instead I ought to play the best performance of each symphony, rather than the shortest, since ultimately that would be a better listening experience for the radio audience. I attempted to do as he asked, but I could only guess at whose Second Symphony was better, whose Fifth. I sure didn’t know. I’m certain that there were phone calls to the station from Cambridge-area audiophiles who were affronted by the choices I made.

Another time, I was one-manning a program and, between announcing breaks, a more senior station member turned up on some errand or other. He stopped in to listen to a few measures of the music coming out of the monitors, a Beethoven piano sonata. Turning towards me briefly he asked, “The Arrau?”, meaning pianist Claudio Arrau. It wasn’t really a question. He knew just by listening for a few moments whose performance it was, and he wanted me to know that he knew. More signaling.

I realized later how much affectation went along with just about everything, in my college days. I studied, but I was not really a student. My radio voice was authoritative, but I was not really an authority on classical music, or any other kind of music. And though it later provided me with employment for a time, I chose not to commit to the disembodied life of a radio personality.

And now, back to the concert hall. After the final finale, unless the concert has been a complete disaster, and sometimes even then, the audience explodes with applause, and then rises (in a now-ritualized practice some disdain as ovation inflation) and claps with increased gusto, and now the conductor, having departed, comes back onstage, beaming, and brings the soloists too, and the conductor has key members of the orchestra stand, one by one, and the audience claps even louder, remembering that clarinet solo, and that place where the second violins did something special, though they can’t recall exactly what. Then the conductor and soloists leave again and the applause ebbs away a bit, then they come back once more and the applause rises again. This may go on for some time. But everyone tries to avoid what might be called the applause vacuum, where the applause peters out before the conductor and soloists have quit the stage for good, forcing them to make their way through the back rows of the orchestra in an uncomfortable silence.

Now the trance-state is broken. It’s OK to yawn, to cough, to clear your throat. You rummage for your coat and hat; you have to leave now, you may not stay. The theater doors swing open, and cold air rushes in as the concertgoers make their way outside. There is some chatter about that piece, or how well the orchestra scaled that particular summit, but mostly the talk seems to be about where are we going for dinner, and who are we meeting up with where and when, or how bracing it feels to be suddenly outdoors. Our own small-talk isn’t up to the task of deconstructing the concert we’ve just heard.

MORE LOOSE ENDS

There was classical music in my parents’ collection that I liked (that is, as a child I liked listening to certain recordings of certain pieces, over and over). I remember “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Bernstein, New York Philharmonic), and Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” which I was not allowed to play at my college station because it was considered too “pops,” too low-brow. I remember “Bolero” (Munch, Boston Symphony, the only recording of it I’m aware of where the trombones at the end don’t sound ridiculous). I was not allowed to play that at my college station either; too well-worn, a “warhorse.” And a little red translucent 45rpm disk containing Tchaikovsky’s stirring “Marche Slave,” which I played and played and played until it wore out. (Same deal at my college station: nix on that too, a warhorse.)

Was this a proper early grounding in the classics? No. There was no music from the Renaissance or Baroque periods, no opera, little chamber music, nothing more “modern” than the Ravel. Essentially, our home library of LPs was my father’s homage to his own mother and her father, for whom the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky, Symphony Hall, and the canon of 19th-century European big-symphony music (plus whatever “modern” music Koussevitsky championed... if it was OK with him, it was OK with them) were considered to be sacred... the be-all and end-all, the highest quality music imaginable. And, not knowing any better, I fell into line with that view.

I did get better at it. But sometimes I think, what I know about classical music plus $5 would get me a coffee and a cruller at Dunkin’s. Classical music: it’s this thing where you’re sitting around listening to it and then you can’t wait to turn it off. Bartok? Scriabin? Stockhausen? Forget it! Turn it off! Turn that crap off!

You can see it right here; my requirements and therefore my knowledge were simple, and they remain stubbornly so. I like these composers (but not everything they ever wrote, not by any means), and my preferences are almost solely guided by ear, not affected by what each composer was attempting to achieve, or how this or that piece fit in with their larger portfolio of work.

I did not understand how music was composed or performed, and played no instrument myself. I did sing in a large chorus in my freshman year at college, and was privileged to be part of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth at a packed house in Sanders Theater, but mostly fell away from the hard work of singing serious music in public after that. I never grew to liking opera, was never bitten by the Ring Cycle bug. Some of my fellow announcers at school were fanatics about Wagner; it seemed to be something that went hand-in-hand with being an educated person, so I made an effort to learn the names of the operas and their proper order in the cycle. It seemed better to fit in, or at least to appear to fit in.

It’s amazing to me now how little I know, and how small my world still is. How did other people become who they were supposed to become? Where did they find the time?