No Snobs Allowed!

I saw this just too late to include in my miscellanea today, but perhaps it deserves its own post. Over at the Washington Post, reviewer Anne Midgette offers the counter-argument to Jay Nordlinger about whether classical music should be relevant or "popular."

Classical music aficionados: Go away. This article is not for you. Instead, it is for everyone who sees classical music as a private club and who feels they’re standing outside the clubhouse. It’s for those who have been to one or two orchestral concerts but are still not quite sure what they’re supposed to be getting out of the experience.

Well, I think we will stick around anyway, Anne! I taught music for thirty years, everything from beginning guitar lessons to chamber music to advanced music appreciation and theory, so I have some understanding of how people experience music. You know, listening to music is like a lot of other human activities: we normally and naturally participate in it without doing any kind of rational analysis. I think it was Jean Piaget that pointed out that a group of children typically invent games to play, but if you were to take them aside and ask them to describe the rules of the game, they would be incapable of doing so. So it is with music. I get an astonishing amount out of the experience of listening to, say, Mozart, but the task of describing exactly what it is I get is so formidable that I would be reluctant to even begin. The idea that one should be sure what one is getting from the experience of music is one of those common but idiotic ideas that plague public discussion of the arts.

Thankfully, after that opening obligatory condemnation of "snobbery" (better described perhaps as competence?), Anne goes on to suggest some basic pieces to listen to:

There are a lot of journeys to choose from. Pick one of the nine Beethoven symphonies (I love the third and the less-popular fourth), and add to your plate gradually, choosing from the smorgasbord of the Western canon: Brahms’s Second; Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, Mahler’s Fifth; Bruckner’s Seventh, and into the 20th century with Shostakovich’s Fifth.

Ok, nothing wrong with that. But won't she fall afoul of all the "woke" musicologists by even mentioning that there is such a thing as a "canon"?

The term “classical music” is an inaccurate catchall for everything from solo piano works to Gregorian chant to contemporary instrumental sextets with electric guitar.

That's true, but the unmentionable element that makes some music "classical" and other music "popular" is its durable aesthetic value. Anne Midgette bows to the other icon of "diversity" by including as many pieces by women composers as possible:

Then there are trios: string trios, like Mozart’s stunning Divertimento in E-flat; or piano trios, written not for three pianos (a common misconception) but for a piano and two stringed instruments. Schubert’s two are among my favorites, and I bypass Robert Schumann’s in favor of the nice one by his wife, Clara Schumann.

I kind of agree with that last because I tend to dislike Robert Schumann's chamber music. Sure, I have reasons for doing so, but I will save that for another time.

3. Classical music is relaxing. I don’t actually agree with this statement, but because a solid 75 percent of my friends who aren’t classical aficionados espouse it, I’m going to cede the point and offer you a few options for background music that take you beyond Vivaldi and Mozart.

Here is an important point: I am with Anne on this. Classical music, like all great art, should not (cannot) be relaxing. That reduces the challenge of art down to sonic medication. All I can say is that the people who look to music for this and nothing more don't really get it. Towards the end of the article Anne offers a decent thumbnail of the nature of classical music that pretty much contradicts what she said in the first paragraph: it turns out that classical music does demand more focus and attention than other musics:

I don’t buy that classical music corners the market on feelings or emotions. But classical music does make a particular kind of musical statement, often immersive, often longer than other forms and often in a particularly complex manner that involves the juxtaposition of different voices. Like a novel, it’s not something that can be apprehended quickly or conveyed in any other form; like a novel, you have to meet it halfway and think about what it is or isn’t saying to you, listening to the different sounds it offers, recognizing the reemergence of earlier themes, weighing the pauses and the crescendos — and, rather than worrying about what you’re supposed to get, thinking about what you do get.

 As a little envoi, let's listen to a singularly unrelaxing piece of classical music, the third movement of the String Quartet No. 3 by Shostakovich played by the Emerson Quartet. Fasten your seat belts!