simonlife

I would probably be considered liberal in regard to my opinions on most issues of some political relevance, and that would seem to suggest a similar kind of thinking in other respects too. Well, no; obviously, the human brain is not so simple. When it comes to classical music, for example, I am doggedly conservative.

There’s something about the fundamental classical tradition that really appeals to me. I absolutely love “going to the symphony”, plopping myself down in my seat, and soaking in the music. I love sitting there in the gaping expanse of an old concert hall, with the stage lit plainly in bright, white light. I love seeing the violins and the cellos and the clarinets and the horns and oh my, this pieces requires a contrabassoon! Look at that!

“Pop” Classical Music

It’s not uncommon these days to see major recording labels pick and choose individual movements from symphonies, quartets, concertos, you name it, and pack all of them onto a mawkishly titled compilation album. How many times have you seen a CD title that starts with “The Best of”? There must be a million such classical albums, and I won’t buy them. A symphony with all its movements is a single work. A collective whole. There seems to be something wrong with breaking it into pieces by extracting a movement simply because it is bounded by silence on both ends.

Even worse are those albums that contain abridged versions of works. I’ve heard Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture stripped down to a three minute reinterpretation of the love theme, and the Adagio sostenuto of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 rendered a lackluster quotation of the opening bars, starved of context. The Top 100 Classical Masterpieces albums are notorious offenders.

Pop songs based on classical music also bother me a little bit, especially when I only find out about their true origins after I’ve enjoyed listening to them for like, ten years. So you see, this isn’t so much a matter of musical taste as it is a pedantic recognition of the forms and traditions of the genre, however arbitrary they may be.

Listening Habits

All these things being said, I try to adapt my listening habits accordingly. When I listen to a symphony, I indeed listen to the symphony. The whole of it. It can take anywhere from fifteen minutes (Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1) to an hour or longer (Bruckner, Mahler), and that’s a long time, but the experience is supremely satisfying. And while I usually don’t just sit there and listen, I try to occupy myself with tasks that allow me to tune in to the music (i.e. homework or blogging). Interestingly enough, I sometimes listen to my soundtracks in the same way.

It may sound strict, but it doesn’t make listening to music any “harder” than it normally is. If I don’t have the time or the proper environment for something classical, or if I’m simply not in the mood, I just put my “pop” playlist on shuffle and let it go.

With Good Reason?

Perhaps I am so nit-picky because I am “classically trained” (it sounds high and mighty, but it’s kind of a loaded phrase). All the rehearsals and private lessons in my youth may have instilled in me a desire to treat classical music as a disciplined and austerely structured matter. I don’t know for sure. In any case, I’ve somehow come close to moralizing the issue, except that I don’t mind that other people are buying the aforementioned albums. If that’s what it takes to get people to listen to classical music, then I’m fine with that.

What bothers me is that some people will go a lifetime thinking that they know classical music without ever hearing a whole symphony. I also wonder what the composers of the past would think if, in their graves, they knew that their music was no longer being heard in its original form, but rather in renditions adapted for contemporary usage. It seems like a trivial point, and one might think that the composers would be tolerant of the changes that have made music what it is today, but form was extremely important to these men (most of them were men anyway). Large-scale musical forms are part of what gives program music its significance and meaning. It seems kind of remiss to toss that out the window.