A friend of mine, former chair of philosophy at UC Berkeley, once got a huge laugh with his introduction of a piece of music about Columbus discovering America. “Now I know that a lot of folks insist that Columbus didn’t discover America,” he began, “and they say that the native Americans got there first.”
True enough.
He went on: “But if you can discover that your wife has been cheating on you…” (audience tittering began) “then why couldn’t Columbus discover America?”
At which point certain folks nearly fell out of their seats. My friend really didn’t need to add the wrapup: “After all, in both cases you don’t know about it, and then you know, so it’s a discovery, right?”
I was reminded about this the other night when I mentioned to a music-munching acquaintance of mine how deeply impressed I have been with Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasíon ségun San Marco. I may have been a decade late to the party—the work was premiered in 2000, after all—but I’ve been dancing and flinging my champagne glass about nonetheless. My ever-au-courant friend spoke rather witheringly of my newfound attachment. That thing, he snorted. It’s ten frigging years old, pal. We’ve all moved on. Golijov has moved on. I’ve moved on. You need to move on.
For a moment there I felt as retro and out-of-it as though I were wearing orange bell-bottoms and a silk-screened vinyl polyester Nik-Nik shirt. But I soldiered on bravely, mewing desperately that the piece was new to me, even if not to him. But it was no go; I had branded myself as a hopeless backsliding fuddy-duddy in his eyes. I detached myself from his disapproving presence and slinked over to the buffet, there to fortify myself with a hummus wrap and melon chunks.
I never liked that guy very much, anyway.
Besides, he’s an idiot. I mean that in the nicest way, but I mean it. To be ignorant that the timeline of one’s own experiences differs from others is the thinking of an idiot. It’s the thinking of a brainless teeny-bopper who thinks that his/her oh-so-circumscribed world is the whole of experience, and that anybody who doesn’t partake of that world (i.e., parents, teachers, basically the entire adult population) is not worth considering.
But teeny-boppers grow out of that phase and acquire some breadth, however little. My acquaintance with his withering scorn—no teeny-bopper he—somehow failed to acquire that necessary breadth, at least per his musical perceptions.
Serendipitous events tend to converge and this particular instance is no exception. Just yesterday I signed on the dotted line and committed myself to teaching Freshman-level music appreciation at UC Berkeley for the 21st year in a row. Any number of my colleagues wonder what compels me to continue imparting the basics of Western music to a class of college freshmen. After all, music-apprish is typically the bailiwick of the juniors in a music department, a handy venue for a neophyte teacher to soak up some practical teaching experience. How many colleges think of it as Clap for Credit 101? And in how many colleges is it taught so lifelessly, or even so downright incompetently, so as to crush even the slightest glimmer of interest in some 18-year-old heart?
Even my predecessor teaching this particular course was taken sharply aback when he discovered that I had continued to soldier on after two-plus decades. He had recommended me as his replacement, figuring that I would occupy the podium for a few years and move on, just as he had done.
But I haven’t moved on, despite my professional life having changed dramatically since I gave my first Music 27 class in the fall of 1989. Then I was newly-promoted to full-time status at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music after ten years of part-time, still working as a free-lance musician and piano teacher, definitely an arrived professional musician but still junior-ish. As I sign on to Year 21, I have been the chair of my Conservatory department for over a decade, a seasoned senior professor, lecturer and program annotator at the San Francisco Symphony, no longer a freelance musician and no longer a piano teacher for that matter.
These days I make this apparent illogicality the subject of my very last remarks to the class when I teach Music 27 at Cal. It’s one of the few lectures that I have actually scripted and rehearsed, because it’s the single most important thing I have to say to them and I don’t want to screw it up. This finally brings me to the Big Question that I have avoided answering all semester, I begin. That question is: why am *I* teaching this class? Why is the chair of music theory at a major conservatory, a professor with three decades of experience, a lecturer and program annotator for one of the world’s great orchestras, teaching a freshman-level class in elementary music appreciation, a class that is usually assigned to the department junior, or even a graduate student?
I go on: My mission has not been to teach you, not really. My mission has been to seduce you. (That gets a laugh, or at least a titter. I usually mimic somebody saying “Well, I’m OUTTA HERE!!!” and making a beeline for the door.) Now you know what I mean—I don’t mean THAT. (Bigger laugh.) Of course I want you to learn about music. But more than anything, I want to leave you with a realization that it’s fun, thrilling, wonderful, and endless. That “classical music” —whatever the heck that means—isn’t music for stuffy old people or tuxedo-clad twits dripping smug superiority or dryer-than-dust intellectuals. It’s for everybody, and it’s for you. It’s our collective birthright, a precious gift that each of us gets just for having been born. It’s ours to discover, celebrate, and love as we wish.
Even after all these lectures, all these onscreen slides, the contents of those 6 CDs that you’ve had to absorb and identify on listening tests, we’ve only skimmed the surface. What we’ve covered is less than one facet of one grain of sand on one beach. The rest of it all—all those facets of all those grains of sand on all the beaches of all the world—is out there, waiting for you. And more is being made every day. So get out there and go exploring!!
I daresay that many of the folks reading this particular post have some—or significant—musical background. Let me ask you: how many of the Haydn symphonies do you know particularly well? How many of his string quartets, piano trios, string trios, divertimenti, masses, operas, piano sonatas, concertos? How many of the Mozart symphonies? How many quartets, piano trios, divertimenti, etc? Bach’s cantatas, keyboard music, chamber works? Can you say you really have Beethoven fully absorbed? Have you taken the time to really explore the Missa Solemnis? The Mass in C? For that matter, the Seventh Symphony?
It goes on—and we go on—and the process never ends. But we keep on exploring, discovering, learning. It doesn’t matter if Haydn’s Symphony No. 98 in B-flat Major was premiered in the mid-1790s. If it’s new to you, then it is as new as if the ink were still drying on the manuscript, and its capacity to thrill, to amaze, and delight remains undiminished—and always will.
And that’s why my acquaintance—he of the smug superiority over having heard the Golijov St. Mark Passion before I did—is an idiot.