This morning I sent my Advanced Analysis students off to their grand adventure, the first of a string of such forays to come. To the uninitiated, the adventure doesn’t sound particularly grand; to tell the truth, it doesn’t sound like an adventure at all. The challenge: to create a full Schenkerian foreground analysis of the G Minor Minuet from the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook, traditionally attributed to J.S. himself but nowadays demoted by musicological fiat to the humbler pen of Christian Petzold.
Analyzing a pretty little Minuet that most of us have known since age 5 or thereabouts hardly seems like an earth-shattering task. Yet I warned the class that this unassuming morceau is going to sprout fangs. This has nothing to do with any professorial boorishness on my part, assigning neophyte students a piece of music beyond their current abilities. It has everything to do with the bright new light the project will be shining on the very act of listening to, and making sense of, a piece of music. They’re going to have to ask a lot of questions, re-listen and re-think and re-evaluate. Then they’re going to have to communicate their thoughts using Schenker’s canonical graphic analysis—of which they have as yet only a light grasp.
As a step along the path towards acquiring some skill in Schenkerian technique, it’s valuable enough, but as a pie-in-the-face confrontation with the very nature of the music we hear on a daily basis, it’s priceless. The Bach/Petzold minuet will not be a trifle for the duration. It will be a big, honking challenge. And that’s just great. We all tend to neglect the precious rarity of fine art, because it’s all around us, all the time. How can masterful accomplishments retain their stature when we can invoke them with a tap of a finger on a touchscreen or a click of a button? Whether Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in the Beethoven Eroica or Ernie Stubbins Plays Your Polka Favorites, we can summon the thing without exerting ourselves or even thinking very much about it.
There was a time—not very long ago—when that Eroica performance required some real doing on our part. Even if we were fortunate enough to live in a city with a symphony orchestra, we had no choice but to seize any opportunity that came our way. An Eroica performance might be an every-five-year event. Thus we would go to the symphony hall on full alert, probably having pored over the score well in advance, maybe even played through it numerous times on the piano if our skill level was up to such a challenge. No matter how well prepared we were in advance, the performance would require our utmost attention, since we had precisely the one chance to absorb as much as possible. (Detailed descriptions from attendees at 19th century concerts would seem to indicate that at least some people were capable of imprinting an amazing amount of info from a single hearing.)
The Greeks restricted performances of tragedy to just one day of the year. No examining Antigone frame by frame or scene by scene. No grousing about whether or not the director positioned the actors properly or whether the company was making use of the latest textural refinements. Nope. You sank into the zone and soaked up your annual tragic trilogy. You got what you got from it, and the rest was up to memory.
At this point a disclaimer is required: I am not advocating turning the clock back to pre-media days. For one thing, it’s a silly idea. For another, there is a great deal to be said for having ready access to art in all its variety. I love having the Eroica at my fingertips. Right now London’s magnificent Philharmonia Orchestra, in its mid-1960s incarnation, is serenading me with Albeniz’s Dansas Espagnoles on a fine Decca LP. I could never have heard that live. I am the happy owner of a spectacular library of recordings. I go to concerts, I listen to recordings, I study scores. No complaints.
But gluts create gluttons. There’s no question but that we are glutted with great music, and not just via recorded media. San Francisco is an enthusiastically and intensely musical city. We are blessed by orchestras big and small, chamber groups, opera companies, soloists, bands, choruses—you name it. Our best are indisputably world-class. Competition ensures that even our second- or third-tier ensembles are jim-dandy. We tend to fill our concert halls and opera houses and recital rooms. We San Franciscans are addicted to great music in peerless performances. But maybe we take it all just a bit too much for granted. Not too long ago I was bored to distraction by an overbearing globe-trotting opera fan who insisted on listing in tedious detail the performances he had heard over the past six months. There was nothing in the litany save the where, the what, and the who. A collector, in other words, rather than a connoisseur. My feeling was that he had attended thirty operas from Baroque to brand-new, in houses from La Scala to the Met to Covent Garden, and he had not heard a note of any of them, at least not in any meaningful way. He wasn’t really hearing so much as cataloguing, comparing, and pigeonholing.
I could sit here smug and secure in my conceit that I would never be so crass, but I can recall similar, and embarrassing, incidents in my own listening life. The urge to pig out can prove irresistible when one lives in the midst of an ever-replenished banquet. Perhaps the occasional pig-out does no harm and might even be healthy in the long run. But as dietary gluttony dulls the appetite and the senses, an overabundance of music deafens us to the everyday miracle of music-making and music-hearing.
Staying musically trim amidst a staggering overabundance of riches: not an easy task. But crucial, not only for our individual well-being, but to the ultimate health of the art itself.