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| Booklet (Samizdat), 2002 Song of the Perfect World A Musical Hallucination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan THE CITIZENS of my town are about to try a little experiment. At twelve o'clock a week from Thursday, everyone is going to listen to the same piece of music. We held a town meeting to decide on a selection—which wasn't easy, tastes being as varied as they are. The gang at the post office wanted Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, but the high-school drama club had just put on Don Giovanni and the kids wanted a break from Mozart, maybe Chopin or Debussy. Naturally, the folks at the senior center were pushing for fifties music—Stravinsky's Agon, Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. At the back of the hall, the middle-school football coach was shaking his head in disbelief. "So what's wrong with Liszt's Sonata in B Minor?" he demanded. Too diabolical, everyone agreed. "In times like these," our mayor said shrewdly, "we need music that brings everyone together." And so it was decided. At the appointed hour, work will stop, buses will pull over, and every Walkman, car stereo, and clock radio in town will be tuned to the local FM station as it broadcasts the String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat Major, Op. 130, by Beethoven, and not just popular highlights, either, but all 65 minutes of it, including the often omitted "Grand Fugue" movement. Then we will discuss it. And then Plato will come back from the dead and sign copies of The Republic. As you have already guessed, I am describing an alternative reality, a utopian society where everybody is familiar with, listens to, and gives a damn about classical music. On the face of it, a utopia based on this marginal and extravagant pursuit is an absurd place. Music of any kind seems like a shaky foundation for civic order. Much as people love music, it is commonly seen as one of life's frills, a pleasant diversion from things that really matter. If it were otherwise, then public schools—which I take to be a reliable barometer of national priorities—would not dispense with music before they dispensed with literature, with algebra, with football. And music educators would not have to justify their existence by pointing out the ancillary benefits of learning an instrument: notably, higher SAT scores and less drug abuse. As for classical music—it would seem the people have spoken on that one. The classical share of the CD and tape market in the United States is below three percent (the most successful opera recording in 10 years has sold 18,000 copies worldwide, according to Justin Davidson, a music critic at Newsday), and symphony orchestras, when they are not crossing over into pop, are forced to scramble for philanthropic life support, or are simply euthanized. But what if music only seems unimportant? What if it is dispensable only because so much of it is designed to be disposable? And what if classical music in particular, shut off though it may be from fashion and the concerns of the moment, turned out to have a deep resonance with the ideals of a free society, with the values that make for humane government and good neighbors? My musical utopia would not, in that case, be so absurd after all. In fact, as alternative realities go, a town where football coaches can name the key of the Liszt piano sonata might not be a bad place to live. There is nothing inherently trivial about music. Julian Johnson, a composer and lecturer at Oxford University—and a remarkably clear-headed musical philosopher—drives that point home in his recent book Who Needs Classical Music? Other societies in other times, Johnson reminds us, have observed music's ability to animate and elevate, marveled at the mysterious, seemingly god-given properties of scales and harmonies, and concluded that music must be a potent force indeed, one that transcends both the performer and the listener. The tamer and less numinous medium we know today is the product of the modern commercial entertainment industry. The industry embeds music within so many other elements—celebrity, fashion, consumption, group identity, sex, nostalgia—that whatever power it might possess in its own right becomes all but invisible. Any sense that music bears a "relation to an order of things larger than ourselves," as Johnson puts it, has evaporated. In its place is the idea, aggressively cultivated by marketers, that the music you listen to is just another lifestyle choice: Coke or Pepsi? Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger? Hip-hop or heavy metal? Then, as if by design, the product wears out. "One might at least pause to wonder why today's hits, apparently deeply significant to millions, become objects of derision in a matter of years," Johnson writes. "This pattern bears a striking similarity to the requirements of commodity capitalism itself, which functions only by the constant renewal of its products." The problem with treating music as a product, as Johnson points out, is that products reflect the values of the commercial marketplace: what's current, what sells. Although commercial values are a cherished part of American life, even the most abject slave to consumerism will probably admit (say, in a moment of exhaustion while in transit between Old Navy and Sam Goody's) that they are not the only values, and not the deepest values. If music in general seems peripheral to the things that really matter, the reason, says Johnson, is that "we frequently identify with music whose value-position objectively contradicts that which we claim in other spheres of life—such as ethics, politics, or education." The special virtue of classical music—the virtue that should exempt it from the category of nice-but-not-important—is that it doesn't contradict the values of those other spheres. It is made of the same stuff. To show this, it is necessary to invoke, with much coughing and throat-clearing, the term art. Yes, art can be found in popular music. Yes, music that is called "classical" can be short on art, or can be used in ways that obscure art, et cetera et cetera. But classical music, according to the most sensible definition yet proposed for that confusing term—which is to say Johnson's definition—is music that aims to function primarily as art. Johnson reaches that conclusion without sentimentality: "[Classical music's] claim to function as art derives from its peculiar concern with its own materials and their formal patterning, aside from any considerations about its audience or its social use." To contemplate a work of art, be it musical, literary, or visual, is to enter a structure that has been assembled through logic and imagination. Whatever else it may be, art is a way of encoding thought. Mind you, Johnson's is a stripped-down, minimalist view of what art is about (it says nothing about beauty or emotion, for example). Yet it lays bare the connection between classical music and the values that underlie our society's better nature. To Johnson, classical music's values—art's values—are humanistic values, affirmations of the intellectual and cultural ideals that germinated in the Renaissance and blossomed into the Enlightenment: "The subtlety, complexity, and refinement of classical music are not arbitrary ways of distinguishing those who participate in it from those who do not. They are the qualities a humanist culture has valued as the condition of our humanity, the qualities by which we have defined the humanist ideal to which we aspire: reflective thought, tempered passion, care for the particular balanced by awareness of the whole, imagination, self-determination, persistence in the face of adversity, freedom." So when someone asks, "Why is classical music important? Why should people learn about it, perform it, or support it?" Johnson's response—that it is the embodiment of everything human beings stand for—seems like a more than adequate answer. IN DREAMING UP a community that regards listening to a Beethoven string quartet as a worthwhile exercise, I am simply imagining what life would be like if classical music were to assume its logical place at the heart of American society, alongside other humanistic institutions like the Bill of Rights and free public education. And I can't help thinking that life would be richer, deeper, and in many ways more satisfying. If you were to visit my musical utopia, the first thing you would notice (besides a lower incidence of young citizens doing doobies on street corners) is that people know how to listen. Hairdressers cut your hair the way you ask them to. When you phone a computer help desk, the attendant addresses your problem, not a half-remembered version of somebody else's problem. Doctors treat the malady you came in with. Waitpersons get your order right. Parents pay attention to the little worries of their children. Spouses hear one another out. If this isn't an earthly paradise, what is? The musical utopia is, in fact, an island of rapt attention in a sea of distraction. Look at what our high-bandwidth culture has made of listening: we're supposed to read scrolling headlines while the network anchor reports the news, or to pore over handouts and follow a PowerPoint presentation as a colleague is speaking. I have several friends who type while talking on the phone. Although employers sing the praises of "multitasking," the term is just a euphemism for ADD, in a form that is creeping into all aspects of life. How many people do you know, in this world of scattered and competing inputs, who sit and listen to music? I mean really listen, instead of allowing the music to perfume the air around them while their mind is on other things? When people are commuting, chatting, dining, reading, or operating heavy machinery, they are not truly listening, and in time the ability to connect ears and brain—to evaluate and interpret what they are listening to—becomes vestigial. In my utopia, music seldom goes unnoticed. That's because the classical repertoire—unless it is carefully culled to promote "relaxation"—makes such lousy background music. In contrast to the cozy monoculture of popular music, which confines itself to a single genre (the song), a single musical language (rock and its recent dialects), a single instrumentarium (electric guitars and their amplified ilk), and a single relevant time period (this week), classical music is an ecosystem of Amazonian diversity. Songs coexist with symphonies, concertos, overtures, tone poems, sonatas, operas, oratorios, cantatas, masses, motets, preludes, fugues, fantasies, themes and variations, suites, ballets, and the many species of chamber music. The language depends on the technologies and sensibilities of different eras, spanning five or six centuries of human activity. And within that enormous musical biosphere, each composition places unique demands on the ear. While a pop song offers three minutes of dependable uniformity (one tempo, one beat, one volume, one texture, one mood), a classical work is typically a moving target. It contains propositions and arguments, tensions and resolutions. It transforms itself as it goes along, speeding up and slowing down, rising and falling in volume, migrating through different keys, shifting in tone color, and reassembling its constituent parts. You can't listen to such music passively, for the same reason you can't read a novel passively: there is simply too much going on. To get anything out of music like this, you have to listen in two dimensions at once. You listen vertically, focusing on the layers of voices. And you listen horizontally, following the musical conversation as it develops. What if we listened to people both vertically and horizontally? At the very least, we might understand one another better than we do. We might also become better-informed and more engaged citizens. Listening, after all, is half of democracy, the silent partner of free speech. If one can follow the tangled melodic lines of a Bach fugue, one stands a chance of cutting through the Babel of words over national security or of picking out the false notes in an address to the United Nations. And if one can sit through an hour and a half of Mahler and say "Thank you, sir, may I have another?" one is ready to graduate from the sound bites of a pandering mediocracy to the more expansive realm of primary elections, presidential debates, Supreme Court decisions, C-Span, and Charlie Rose. In the musical utopia, citizens listen to differing points of view, and politicians listen to the electorate. People are all ears. But that's just one of the civic benefits of classical music. IN A PESSIMISTIC essay entitled "The Numbing of the American Mind: Culture as Anesthetic" (Harper's Magazine, April 2002), Thomas de Zengotita complains that people are "suffocating in a vast goo of meaningless stimulation." He blames this on (among other things) the "despair of finitude"—a supposition that everything that can be done in art has already been done. De Zengotita presumes that only so many combinations of shapes and colors, or plots and characters, are possible before you have to start recycling. The end of music is at hand, he argues: "How many distinguishable sounds can be put in how many patterns? There has to be some limit. After you've integrated techno and Brazilian-Afro and Tibetan monko and Hump-backed Whalo, at some point, surely, there's going to be nothing left but play it again, Sam. Maybe that's why it's the age of the mix." Nothing left? It's true that Western music has only twelve notes to play with—just as the English language is built from 26 letters. But when you multiply notes by rhythms by harmonies by the number of ideas the brain can generate, you always get a product that looks to me like infinity. (Not that it matters. Who says people need constant novelty to enjoy art? Or food or sex or anything else?) What de Zengotita is actually despairing over, perhaps, is the finitude of commercial entertainment. It is the number of safe formulas for turning music into megabucks that is limited, not the medium itself. One can easily believe that music's possibilities have been exhausted if one listens only to music that is categorically forbidden to explore them, or if (as the industry seems to hope) one's relationship with music consists of shallow physical encounters with a string of anonymous partners. De Zengotita, far from being anesthetized by American culture, is in pain. He is aching to be released from the straitjacket of corporate values that say culture is finite, has played itself out, and is now on rewind. And I daresay he is not alone. A sense of possibility. That's what is missing from the picture, and it is something that classical music provides as cheerfully as Sammy Sosa provides home runs. The history of classical music is an unbroken series of daring and sometimes crazy experiments: the weird Renaissance harmonies of Carlo Gesualdo, the birth of opera from 16th-century monody, the dazzling intricacy of Bach's Art of Fugue, Beethoven's late string quartets (which as vividly as anything ever written depict the roving of a free mind), Wagner and the "total artwork," the controlled pandemonium of Charles Ives, Schönberg and the twelve-tone system, indeterminism, musique concrète, microtonality, minimalism, hyperinstruments. Whether or not one "likes" the music that arises from them, these explorations say a lot about the latitude that is available to artists who set out to create art, instead of merely to satisfy consumers. For the imaginative composer, whatever exists can be improved, and whatever is lacking can be provided. There are no dead ends. That sense of possibility is echoed in the optimism of the music itself. To use a simplistic measure, the last few hundred years of music-making have produced more works in major keys than in minor, more upbeat endings than sad ones. Tellingly, the most famous minor-key piece ever written, Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, ends in the sun-drenched clime of C major. Beethoven's Fifth is the epitome of a large class of music devoted to the idea—worked out at length in Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Bruckner, Richard Strauss—of triumph over hardship. And where music is associated with a text or story, there is no shortage of other life-affirming themes: spiritual enlightenment, global unity, rebirth, love, joy, and on and on. One could even argue that the dominant organizing principle of 18th- and 19th-century music—sonata-allegro form, in which contrasting musical ideas begin life in different keys but find common ground in the end—is devoted to a single uplifting metaphor, that of détente. Of course, classical music isn't always "happy" music. But when music records human suffering, it does so without despair. Like theater, music is a temporal medium—which means it is also a temporary medium. Any anguish that you, the listener, are subjected to will soon be over, freeing you to reflect on it and carry on. Music that is outwardly a downer—the death-obsessed lieder of Schubert and Schumann, say, or Shostakovich in his bleaker moments—does not equate pain with the human condition, any more than Shakespearean tragedy does. You come away from such music, even a deeply unsettling work like Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck or Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître, with the knowledge that tragedy and chaos can be contained, and, better yet, can be ordered and rationalized—reasoned—into a manageable and finite whole. Music, in that case, is the kit bag in which the world's troubles have been miraculously packed up. So if there is finitude in music, it is only in the sense that every work has a beginning and an end. A society that embraces music that embraces possibility is utopian almost by definition. And unlike other experimental societies, it is a sustainable utopia—an adaptable and self-renewing community—not just some theme park whose gigantic fiberglass statuary will lie moldering by the roadside when the theme grows old. The musical utopia keeps getting better. Why? Because its citizens believe they can make it better. The laws can be made more just. People can live in harmony. Human dignity can be reclaimed. That sense of possibility is what enables people to resist tyranny, be it human or technological. It is the lifeboat that delivers people from the "vast goo of meaningless stimulation," perchance to find meaningful stimulation elsewhere. GRANTED, POSSIBILITY is not the same as a roadmap; it hints at the magnitude of change without specifying the direction. The American Dream is full of possibility, but for some reason it leads to oodles of bottled water, a big SUV, and a contemporized grand Cape w/open flr plan, 1st fl mstr suite, 3 season porch overlooking spectacular ac+ lot. Is there any cause to hope that the possibilities encoded in classical music would steer my utopian citizens toward some intangible social agenda instead of toward grander and grander visions of self-enrichment? I believe the answer lies in the intangibility of the art form itself. If you accept Julian Johnson's view of art as the "formal patterning" of materials, then all art points to the intangible. Strip away the façade of literalness and you find a design, an abstract juxtaposition of elements that reduces the artist's own mother (in Whistler's case) to an "Arrangement in Grey and Black." Such abstraction reaches its pinnacle in music. Not only is the medium—sound—invisible, but classical music, or at any rate the 90 percent that is purely instrumental, doesn't even have a literal meaning to strip away. The music's "meaning," if it has one, lies purely in its organization of sounds. Any enjoyment one experiences, whether sensual, emotional, or intellectual, is the mind's response to abstract qualities of design. In this regard, even abstract painting is not as abstract as music; you can find things in nature that are oblong or blue but nothing that is in C major. While visual-art lovers at least love something that looks like something, music lovers love something that is more tenuous than air. And so do idealists. Classical music and ideals have a fair amount in common. Both put principle before comfort. Both are high-maintenance, demanding the close attention of their friends—without which they recede into the hubbub of cynicism, materialism, and electronic noise. And both imply a dissatisfaction with the widely accepted and the ready-made. To pursue either classical music or an ideal is to reach for something that has not been rubber-stamped by a compliant majority, something that lies beyond the world as it is handed to us. Little wonder, then, that both pursuits are undersubscribed. If idealism could use a leg up, classical music provides one—and not just because it is (as Johnson says) a repository of humanistic values. The whole enterprise, from creation to contemplation, is a breeding ground for visionaries and utopians. Composers are a notoriously idealistic lot. Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Verdi, Bach, Liszt, Scriabin, Messiaen—all were evidently seized by transcendental longings that propelled them either toward political (in some cases revolutionary) causes or toward religion's mystical extremes. The very act of composing can be seen as an attempt to design perfect platonic worlds that flout the defects of the one we inhabit. Performers, for their part, are inveterate seekers, revising and revising as they search for the perfect execution of the composer's design (witness Glenn Gould's 1955 and 1981 recordings of the Bach Goldberg Variations, which are like night and day or, more accurately, day and night). And we the listeners absorb all this. Listening to classical music—listening in the mindful way that gets to the heart of it—is a subtle form of indoctrination. Willy-nilly, the citizens of my utopia soak up the subversive principles of art. Clarity. Conviction. Balance. Elegance. Invention. Contrast. Coherence. Mysteriously, these abstractions begin to show up in other areas of their lives, and people miss them when they are not there. In time, the safe, tangible goals of wealth and status, of market share and mindshare, lose their urgency, and the utopians forget what drew them to the commodified writhings of a youth-obsessed, brand-worshipping culture, with its top-ten lists and its celebrity mania and its beautifully fitting jeans. Their heads are clear. Now they can focus on important things: the difficult, the dangerous, the ethereal. In this altered state, the ideals of liberal democracy—intellectual freedom, civil liberty, social justice, and other quixotic notions—begin to reveal themselves. And to the citizens of the musical utopia, these phantoms appear almost graspable. Back on earth, I'm sure you will agree that classical music is too valuable a commodity to be misunderstood. It is too valuable to be viewed as just another option on the menu of musical ephemera. It is too valuable to be branded the property of the wealthy and privileged (who, by the way, don't understand it any better than the rest of us). And it is certainly too valuable to remain the province of a few solitary pilgrims. No, these riches must be shared. While I don't really expect Romantic chamber works to become the subject of lunchtime chat, I can envision a day when classical music occupies a higher place in the culture than it now does. To that end, let me make a modest proposal. Instead of devoting 4,000 hours of your life to community service—as President George W. Bush once asked of all Americans, possibly in jest—devote 4,000 hours to classical music. Believe me, the effect on society will be every bit as salutary. Hours will be credited as follows: 1) Listening to recordings or learning about classical music through books, Web sites, and classes, full credit. 2) Listening while driving, half credit. 3) Listening to classical stations that broadcast "relaxing" Baroque pabulum between ads for Oriental rugs, one-third credit. 4) Attending live concerts, credit-and-a-half. 5) Learning or playing an instrument, double credit. (I'm trying to be as flexible as possible because I know you have other things to do.) That's 4,000 hours to a better world, a world where people listen with open ears, where citizens and elected officials alike sense the possibilities for what their society might become, and where democratic ideals—abstract and unremunerative as they may be—hold the same urgency they held in the days of Jefferson and Paine. Whether you also engage in mass appreciations of Beethoven's late quartets is up to you and your neighbors. But if ever you did happen to come across a recording of the String Quartet No. 13, and if, when you had nothing better to do, you put it on your CD player and (after reading the little booklet and fixing yourself a drink and a snack) sat down to listen to it—perhaps skipping the optional "Grosse Fuge" movement, which is better savored on its own—I would be very curious to know what you thought of it. db Copyright © 2003 David Brittan |
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