Classical Music: Fuck Yeah!

My teacher and I were delving into a Chopin piece I'm working on, the raindrop prelude (awful name), and not just technically either: we talked a lot about singing, about weight and the transfer of weight, about tone and pulsing tones, about direction, about syntax (holy shit "tempo rubato actually means stolen time...what a wonderful imagery), and most of all about silence. The use of silence which surrounds a piece in the beginning and the end, and the way pieces flow from that: does it break the silence (Polonaises)? does it flow from it (Db prelude)? And even more vitally, how does the piece interact with silence over its course? Tempo is a means of pushing away silence, but the composer can interlace silence with the pattern of notes notes, but the color, the tempo, the everything! So much of 20th century experimentation, like the concept of color-tone melody or Klangfarbenmelodie, was about redefining the nature of the way notes interact, and silence plays a huge role! I thought of Webern, among other composers...and my mind turned to the likes of Grouper and Lichens, and the way they play with silence and repetition, with only a guitar, a sampler, and a voice.

That in turn got me thinking about the role of classical music in society. In American culture, at least, there's such a sense of...elitism attached to it. People are astounded at the high prices of good Symphony seats (I'm going tomorrow ftw), and yet shell out so much more for front-row concert tickets. There are a lot of explanations for why...because of the elitists who claim it as the only true form of music?...because of America's desire to overthrow what was a very European culture, and attempt to redefine it with jazz (huge goddamn irony) and rock'n'roll and pop and all?...because of all the intellectual pressure some music puts on its listener?

And this isn't the modern period of "classical music" that's typically referenced, it's your Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, and slightly post-romantic stuff that's focused on! All the big names of the past ages. Mozart noticed, Wagner peeked into, and Schoenberg blew wide open the peak to all this atonal shit that can clear out concert halls. The sometimes super-intellectual and dense and distant, the sometimes ugly, the sometimes rapturous and jaw dropping and terrifying sets of sounds that can be passed over, so quickly, as experimentation and junk. And that's not just Europe! Starting with Ives and going into Cage, music feel deep into experimentation far beyond anything in Europe: in the '50s, the aftermath of WWII left dozens of huge names in California, and in the '60s electronic music created a generation of musicians like mathematicians or scientists. There were pieces written that were silence (and motionless Dance accompaniments to them), pieces that comprised of fists smashing keys, music that was all made on tape reels, compositions based on Chinese divination techniques, music scores that were a sentence or two, music that consists of 40 or so violins playing the same note, and slowly, one by one, diverging until a 40 note chord fills the speakers. It's unbelievable! It's horrendous! It's exciting! It's experimental! It's American! It's so rich and can be so amazing! But nobody notices!

Even as folks like Gershwin and Copland tried for the popular feel, there was a retreating faction of composers who retreated into their darkened studio-laboratories. Minimalists like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, who tried to reduce all of music to its corest elements, are despite their attempts still far away from the popular stream. Thus pop music became the norm, and

I'm not saying that any sort of musical degeneration has occurred. That's a bullshit deconstructive useless thing to say! I have a lot more Beatles, or Islands, or Sufjan Stevens, or Bjork, or Ry Cooder, or Anti-Flag, or Sun Ra, or Nine Inch Nails, or mine and my girlfriend's stuff combined than I do Schoenberg or Mozart.

But man, doesn't the stereotypical maniacal, calculated, unemotional, sadistic villain enjoy a dash of classical music while he's slipping on his stereotypical black leather gloves? Isn't the classically-focused elite so often, so joyfully, and so enthusiastically satirized or rejected by pop music, folk music, punk music, metal, noise...despite the fact that the language they use is so similar? Cadence, rhythm, tonality and all that...they're the same!

What I'm saying is, classical music has a really unjust stereotype. Not every band you hear on the radio is worthwhile or interesting; not every one of Mozart's symphonies are amazing transcendent automatically beautiful pieces. That's nostalgia. People have never, ever stopped making good music. But I wish people would search a bit more, and just find certain pieces that really speak to them. To find a way to ignore all the criticism and analysis of classical pieces, as you've learned to ignore that reedy 20-something who runs the counter at your local record store.

There's just so much richness to be found! Why hold yourself back?