Most of us live in a near-constant state of sensory overload. We are pummeled, assaulted, hassled, and exhausted in a whirlwind of frenetic activity as we rush to our next appointment, honk our way through rush-hour gridlock, and vie for promotions or parking spaces.
That’s from the close of my program note for Kurtág’s "Grabstein für Stephan" in the SF Symphony Playbill. (The full article is here.) I went on to describe how Kurtág’s refined and elegant style serves as an antidote to our frenetic modern lives, offering us a moment’s respite from the blare, the stress, the sonic and visual violence that surrounds us. I spoke in a broader sense than just the piece in question, of course.
Just last week I lectured on Joseph Haydn’s The Creation for concerts by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. In my conclusion I remarked that I am often reluctant to pick up the paper or turn on the news, given the deluge of despair that assaults me at every turn. It seems that we are absolutely horrid beings, we humans, capable of inflicting the most horrendous injustices on each other. But that’s not how it is in The Creation, a place where we are magical beings inhabiting a magical world, we humans "in native worth and honor clad," fundamentally noble and good. Like us, Haydn lived in terribly troubled times. But his spirit sailed above it all—and for a while, when we hear The Creation, we get to sail up there right with him.
After our last concert, one of the orchestra members complemented me on my lecture, and we had a brief chat. He agreed with me that the week had been a delight, playing that wonderful music and drinking in the work’s irresistible optimism. I mentioned to him that it was wonderful to spend time with music that wasn’t hellbent on making you feel bad. I don’t think that registered with him—he laughed, but gave me a funny look. (Well, perhaps I was being a drama queen.)
He’s a period-instrument musician who spends most of his time in the company of generally optimistic music. I, on the other hand, have been dealing with a lot of 20th-century stuff, much of it riddled with angst, despair, and hopelessness. Today’s composition students often write about depression and suicide and morbidity, even if they come from nice upper-middle-class families and have only secondhand experience of the dark side. Optimism is almost a dirty word these days.
I was also thinking of today’s pop music. So much of it assaults, pummels, and violates the listener! Incessant pounding beats, the music of nightmares, combines with shouted lyrics about death, murder, rape, revenge. Nothing speaks of our better angels. It’s all about our worst tendencies, accompanied by visual spectacles that resemble a stage production of Dante’s Inferno, danced with motions mimicking the desperate squirmings of torture. Nobody smiles; it’s all about being grim, about being macho, about being bad-boy hot. How can anybody stand it?
But people do stand it. They more than stand it. They buy it. They make the perpetrators rich and famous. But it’s the music of horror, of nightmare, of war.
Yet music can be about so much more. Not long ago our best popular music sought to enrich, to delight, even sometimes to ennoble. Most of it was drivel—puppy-love tunes puling platitudes for the sighs of the shallow. But the gems have outlasted most of the past century’s "serious" music. And what of our concert-hall masterworks? Maybe someday we will find no continuing inspiration in Beethoven, but I don’t want to be around then. But if Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and all the rest continue to thrive through it all, then those celebrated masters have something to teach us about artistic worth.
You can scream at people all you want. You can tell them how angry you are. You can insult them. You can threaten them. But temper tantrums are things of the moment. They blaze forth, slash, burn, and shred, then subside. Then they’re forgotten.
Beethoven might have his angry moments, but his anger is that of a Titan, not some spoiled kid screaming in rage because he didn’t get laid last night or he can’t afford tickets to the latest sensation. But those giant outbursts aren’t what make Beethoven so special. It’s the bigness of his spirit, the grandeur of a mind that transcends its own petty weaknesses and looks beyond to a vision of our noblest aspirations.
Our most cherished art shows us our hidden saints within, our bodhisattvas, our angels. It brings us face to face with the possibility that we might be better than we think we are, that we just might have potential beyond our day-to-day scrabble. There is no point in a painting of a distorted face screaming, unless we offer a way out of the screaming. That’s what the 20th century forgot, very much to its detriment.
When Henry Hadley launched the San Francisco Symphony on its maiden voyage back in December 1911, he chose the Tchaikovsky "Pathétique" Symphony as the pièce de resistance. It was a good, safe choice—a celebrated work already well established in the repertory. But the "Pathétique" was all of eighteen years old! It was newer than most of today’s "modern" pieces that require such careful shoehorning into an orchestra or chamber concert. But Hadley wasn’t throwing a difficult modern work at his audience—that would have been suicide for this brand-new orchestra. He was giving the audience something he knew they would like, but at the same time, he was establishing that the San Francisco Symphony would be playing music of the masters, and not here-today-gone-tomorrow junk.
So what changed? I can’t think of an eighteen-year-old work that has achieved the repertory status of the Tchaikovsky 6th Symphony. Or the Brahms 4th Symphony, which would have been 24 years old in 1911. Why did we enter the 20th century with a bevy of brand-new repertory items, when we enter the 21st with none?
The "Pathétique" is hardly a joyride. The finale is dark and moody. But that moodiness is counterbalanced by lyrical gracefulness in both first and second movements and a hellzapoppin’ third movement march. You get a little bit of everything in the "Pathétique." The Brahms 4th matches exquisite lyricism (2nd movement) with brilliant structure (1st movement), a glorious fast movement (3rd movement), and concludes with a majestic cathedral of music, the passacaglia fourth movement. It’s an inspiring, wonder-filled work.
I wouldn’t presume to have all the answers, or any answers for that matter. I have only my little opinion. So here it is, for better or worse.
Our composers need to start reaching for the skies again, instead of wallowing in the gutter. Once they do that, we’ll have a chance for another musical Renaissance. Until then, we’re stuck in the Dark Ages, just as we have been for most of the past century.