May 16th 2005 10:32 am Excerpt
On the now rare occasions I am drawn into discussing my musical background, there is quite a bit of struggle on my part to define just what that background means and how it impacts me. Though conversations on the topic of music are frequent, the necessity to define my role in or position on the musical world is decidedly infrequent, and has never been easy. The lengths to which I am prepared to expound upon even simple questions regarding my tastes—and how rapidly such answers become confessionals—should be evidence enough that the matter is very complicated for me. I like to think this is owing to the intricacy of my upbringing and musical self-discovery, my love affair with listening, finding that intriguing detail that never gets old, experimentation with different genres. As a musician I often feel as though I occupy some loosely or undefined middle ground: a more accomplished listener than performer, neither professional nor amateur, neither scholar nor idiot, certainly educated, but most certainly not a snob.
I like the think these things, but the truth of the matter is really far more serious. I am addicted to the top 40 music of the last 15 years. This worries and confuses people a great deal.
(I will disclaim at present that henceforth in this entry the term "popular music" shall refer to said top-40-like music, to avoid igniting the fiery wrath of popular music enthusiasts who claim correctly that there is a great deal of popular music out there that is essentially classical in nature. I listen to Sting and Radiohead and various others who straddle that line too, so calm down).
The fact is that my background is, ultimately, extremely varied. My interest in classical music—what ultimately propelled me into music as a field—began to develop long after my career as a listener had begun. Like most my age, I went through multiple phases in which my taste seemed to change almost overnight, among them heavy metal, classic rock, alternative (when it really was alternative) and grunge, and the profoundly embarrassing soft rock, all of which I still appreciate to varying degrees. And, of course, classical, that wondrous genre I discovered on my own quite by accident and promptly fell desperately in love with. I have always considered myself a more practiced and talented listener that creator of music; I credit the hours upon hours I spent with my CD player when most forthcoming musicians were perspiring over masterpieces or focusing their energies on staying awake during orchestra practice (on the other hand, I blame not having had these experiences for many of my failings as a professional-level musician). I have never been able to outgrow my penchant for recorded music, and even today I almost always choose to shut my eyes and listen rather than take my instrument and create, though I was fortunately able to overcome it for a time at music school.
If nothing else, my varied and largely accidental musical background has lent me an eclectic musical taste, and a generally broad and occasionally confused notion of what is "good." It is that term—good—that is particularly problematic as a vague, unquantifiable abstraction regarding what so often ignites such passionate debate. By the time I went away to school, classical music was easily the music I was most passionate about. While a school of music seems just the place to hone one’s talent for music snobbery and whittle away any enjoyment of popular music, IU was just the opposite for me. There I met people who, with varying degrees of informedness, appreciated popular music far more than classical. Though this was a laughable concept at first, the more I learned (from theory and ear-training classes, no less) and the more I listened, the more I began to appreciate the experience of popular music as well.
I find it best to be generous in one’s conception of what is good, and be able to claim that Mahler and Rachmaninoff were surely gods among men, that Sting is one of the most intelligent popular musicians of our time, and proceed with a straight face that Christina Aguilera’s sophomore album is fantastic (Stripped, not Mi reflejo, or that Christmas monstrosity which we can please pretend never ever happened), that there is something embarrassingly catchy (if devoid of meaning) about that song Breakaway that they play on the radio all the time, and isn’t that Britney Spears song like so fun? It may not be good music, but it is undeniably good at what it does. There is a certain function that this music performs, whether is be to dance to, to exist without demanding attention overmuch, or simply to be available for easy public consumption (i.e. to make lots and lots of money). Much of it does its job very well, and is written so that you love it for a time, and then forget, move on to something else. And if my experience of it is much more enduring, if I listen much harder than is warranted, if my obsession with certain songs continues to wax long after it should have waned, that is my own problem.
Classical music, though, remains my greatest love, the music I am most capable of becoming wholly invested in on a profound emotional level. Given the choice of only five opera (opuses, if you prefer) to have readily at my disposal for the remainder of my life, at least two would be Mahler symphonies, and the rest certainly other works from the late Romantic German oeuvre (which ironically includes a great deal of late 19th-century Russian output). Cleaning and organizing my saved mail a few days ago, a came across a passage worth quoting at length:
The two best concerts I have ever been to still stand out vividly in my memory. Please allow me to rave for a moment—in my heart of hearts I am still just a gigantic music geek who can’t help himself in the face of good—nay, great—music (see? it even makes me wax poetic). The first was a randomly-attended Sunday-afternoon concert during the first couple months of my freshman year that turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be extraordinary. I didn’t know about it until only a few hours before it happened. IU has this lottery every year in which 6 performers are selected to perform in ad hoc groups—that is, they are given rehearsal time and performance space to perform concerti (or whatever, really, including vocal music) with full orchestral ensembles backing them up provided they find their own conductors and find their own orchestras. This was one such concert, a performance of Rachmaninoff’s spectacular 3rd piano concerto. The expectation is that since these groups are not for credit and it was always an instrumentalist’s market (it was rare to have a full string section), the performers do not feel any particular responsibility to practice, attend all the rehearsals, or prioritize this higher than their own practice sessions, and thus the performances themselves were somewhat sub-par. Add to this extremely limited rehearsal time and expectation usually played out fairly accurately. Maybe it was the piece, or maybe it was some chemistry in the randomly-assembled ensemble, but this performance was incredible. The performers thought so too, and I never met anyone who forgot that they were in attendance for the performance, even four years down the road.
The second I knew about almost a full academic year in advance, and it was the performance my junior year of Mahler’s second symphony (which ties with his 5th symphony as my favorite piece of music ever). IU’s top orchestra performed one of the nine Mahler symphonies every year (except my senior year when they did Carmina Burana instead. I mean, Carmina Burana is pretty neat, but it is no Mahler symphony, please. My pain was unfathomable). I got there as early as I could when the house of our performance area was already packed, grabbed a pair of seats in the 3rd or 4th row, went outside to wait for my friend who was uninitiated in the ways of Mahler (who I don’t think ever showed up - this is the only thing I can’t remember now), and got back to my seat just before the lights went down. The symphony runs some 90 minutes over 5 movements including 2 vocal movements (the 4th for solo alto and the 5th for solo bass/baritone, alto, and soprano with gargantuan choir) and was conducted from memory by the most amazing conductor IU has to offer. This was positively one of the most sublime experiences of my life. And I, who do not deserve such luck, had a presentation to give on Mahler the following morning for my music theory class. Whatever I did to deserve that kind of introduction, I need to start doing more often.
(In the middle of composing that last paragraph I remembered that I also more or less melted during NEC’s performance of Mahler’s 9th symphony with Ben Zander last year…but we’ll just pretend I didn’t, okay?)
It is safe to say that Christina Aguilera, the Dixie Chicks, or any of my guiltier pleasures will never replace those three or countless other like them, or come close. Perhaps because they are more enduring, or simply less specific and therefore more universally applicable. This is not to diminish the value of popular music: the classical giants may have a power over my mood popular music can never dream of, but they have no place at a dance party, on a bicycle, anywhere something more single-serve and less demanding of attention is more appropriate.
This does not prevent me in any way from becoming entirely emotionally invested, for a time, in straight, traditional popular music when the occasion (or the right song) arises. My relationship with popular music is complicated and very personal, at best. I can laugh when an otherwise respectable musician tells me he enjoys the song Lucky because it was the first successful minor-key song Britney Spears had sung in a while, and then completely geek out about why it’s awful that she and her boy band contemporaries make a nasty habit of recycling A-section lyrics in the B-section, or how many of Mandy Moore’s (more obscure) lyrics demand further attention, or how talented I think Christina Aguilera really is. It’s not exactly thematic analysis or hard core interpretation, but then it’s not so far off as I would sometimes like to believe. I can take minimal comfort knowing I still don’t begin to approach the level of obsession I found in so many others like me. Because that is almost frightening.
In other news, she has re-entered my life with a vengeance through my eastern wall, shared with Roommate #1, her trite quasi-80s melodies as irritatingly catchy as ever. Oh, shut up. You know I enjoy it. The only genres I have been entirely unable to warm up to are self-referential rap (because I do not care about your bitches or your money) and the godforsaken Latino pop music that booms from beneath Roommate #2’s door in the morning, complete with off-key backup and arrhythmic clapping. Call me closed-minded, but I don’t really see that happening any time soon.
How did you get into the music you listen to? What are your guilty pleasures? Tell here, or write about it on your own weblog!