IN BETWEEN THE LIVES

Don't rage at truth. It's not that I always treat serious music unseriously. There're only a small number of composers that I do not recognize, and I tend to ascribe it to my ill proficiency. Why? Masters and masterpieces have stood hundreds of years of cross-examination and a simple dumb guy like me can do nothing to reverse its greatness therefore it should be me who's dumb enough to be so numb to the Greats as if they're no difference from easy street tunes that should be blamed for denouncing masters and masterpieces. And these small number of composers are mainly German-Austrian and composers before the Romantic era. For them, music is not so much a matter of personal expression than a matter of beauty - beauty of tone, melody, instrument, inner logic, etc. And I don't always buy it.

An example is Beethoven. I often wonder why he asks a bassoon to hop in repetitive octaves in sixteenth notes in so many of his compositions. Then one day I guess perhaps it's his way of expressing joy. And I think it's like this because whenever his bassoon hops like this the music is high. Then is it a dance or something of that kind? I guess so and don't know how to react because this expression of happiness leaves me cold. I can't get how this is an expression of happiness. To me the bassoon sounds like a crippled clown.

Another example is classical symphonies, to be more specific, their endings. To classical symphonies always end abruptly. There's no prolonged last chord, and often a musical phrase as common as anything inside the work would end it. And audience bravo as I am still waiting for the next note. A classmate of mine who doesn't sing once remarked, just identical to my first reaction to Mozart symphonies, that "classical music consists of abrupt turn from ear-bombingly loud moments to ear-straining inaudible moments." And sometimes I wonder, as he does, why they wrote music in this way. Wouldn't the audience be startled or even annoyed?

The only explanation is: we're used to smoothness and melodical beauty that's typical of the Romantic era and the master composers were alien to them. Beethoven felt happy in a different way from how we feel happy. His philosophy of musical beauty is also dramatically different from ours. And to appreciate his music we have to try to recognize his way and walk beside him, to utilize a different set of standards and build it into our hearts, make it as innate as our original set of standards.

This is something like reading. Some prefer Austen's witty, often acerbic writing; some take to E. Bronte's naturalness; some marvel at Hardy's poetic language; some bravo at Maugham's masterful story-telling. But while preferring one type of writing, one needs to absorb and try to appreciate other types, or at least try to understand how the other ways work to create a vivid, capturing presentation. This entails hard work, because it's a matter of conquering not only objective obstacles (of appreciating their music), but also subjective difficulty (of setting up a ready mind.)