This was going to be detailed…
Yeah, this was gonna be a great, insightful, touching post about why I find Beethoven difficult to really, really love. Unfortuntely my brain has been slowed down by the huge hunk of sirloin and six Sam Adams white ales I gobbled down at our first BBQ of the year earlier. So, instead of all that I am simply gonna point out that by the wonders of WordPress I now have a generic all-purpose commenting form thingy, so everyone can tell me how awesome or not so awesome I am. Yay.
Britney can’t touch Beethoven after all
Not that we really seriously considered that she could, but, well, okay let me start at somewhere which is more of a beginning. Recently, since coming back from Baltimore (as I previously complained about) I’ve felt like music has been escaping my clutches a bit. It’s kind of like… well it’s sort of… it’s hard to describe. Sometimes – usually – listening to a piece is enveloping, it transports a piece of my head (or heart, or whatever the appropriate pseudosensory organ is) away.
Now is not that time.
Now is (or was) a tricky, fiddly event in which music seems a distant beast, something that has to be reached for instead of gliding at me with arms all open. The music which was so fulfilling and spoke to me in firm, direct tones is off in another room carousing with the neighbors. Or something.
This time, it’s taken a couple of weeks to ease back into it (and the frequency of Blog postings has taken a bit of a corresponding hit) via my non-classical listening selection. I’ll do another post detailing what that consists of soon I think, because it’s all really very meaningful still, even after mostly converting to classical. What I realized, after rereaching my island full of notes and staves and clefs and stuff, was that most of my non-classical stuff really can’t hold a candle to the real meat, the Shostakovich, the Beethoven, all my classical pieces.
Ya see, sometimes I worry that the only reason I like classical so much is that I listen to the pieces over and over and get to know them so well that my brain is forced into liking them. What I worry is that if I did the same with any other piece of music, the same thing would happen. It’s a worry because if true, I would feel dishonest to myself, like maybe I”m just listening to feel sophisticated.
My recent listening time has reinforced my suspicion that no, this ain’t the case. Popular music is good, but disconnected. It’s similar to the bitchings I had about ballets – each individual five minute segment can be great, but it’s lacking a cohesive whole. And with popular it’s worse. The songs sound so much thinner than they did before. They have often have a catchy, cute musical idea, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing happens. It’s oddly shallow.
That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable to listen to, it’s just that so many things used to seem so much more important before I discovered the depth of good classical music.
The Trouble With Ballet (and quartets with 7 movements)
I’ve consistently had difficulties getting Shostakovich’s string quartets 9, 10 and 11 really embedded in my head. That is, they’re not all absorbed and understood and fused in like 12, 13 and 8 are – even though I’ve listened to them over and over again. They just won’t stick. I think it’s because they have too many movements. It’s hard to see everything in context.
With ballet the problem is similar: each individual movement, which typically last for four or five minutes each, stands out beautifully. Taken as a whole it just can’t compete with the wonderful unification a symphony or concerto usually presents (unless it’s really rubbish). I suppose with ballet it is intended to be shown with dancers flitting and floating and flopping all over the stage, so the need for the music to live out alone by itself is not as strong.
This distance between sections juts out at me right in the ears when I listen to the Shostakovich quartets with more than five movements, they don’t seem unified. Perhaps I really need to blast myself with them even more to hear to the similar musical themes, but it’s tricky. I feel I should have found them by now.
Interestingly (to me anyway, it probably isn’t really all that interesting in the grand old scheme of things) is that I do not have this problem with the song cycles – Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, etc. These seem greatly more consistent, and locked in musical ideas and step.
Perhaps I’m just bad at hearing musical themes. Damn you, my non musical history!
Out of The Musical Loop
In Baltimore I didn’t have any music for five days. Nothing. My mp3 player was left back beside the way to slow computer on my desk in the lab, as I had apparently consumed far more Dead Guy Ale (which is delicious, but surprisingly alcoholic) then required to remember to grab it. Then there was about a fifteen minute window to drive my girlfriend back home and 
get back to my place for the lab crew to pick me up for the drive down 81.
Well, anyway, the point was that I didn’t have any music. I had Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 running through my head all through the conference. I was tip-tapping the timpani at the end of the first movement through all the inappropriate lectures on k this and c that and DNA, RNA and what-have-you. There were glimpses of the late Beethoven string quartets flittering around the freshly daylit room when my eyes opened, but no satisfaction – nothing more tangible than in-head echoing.
And when I got back it seemed more distant, instead of drawing me directly back in. The music was disappointed with my absence and won’t give me attention until I give it some. Seriously though, despite the painful faffing around with words there’s truth in them there sentencing. It’s hard to get back sometimes. There are off patches, weeks where I want to listen to the birds and the kids and the wind while I am walking into work, instead of Beethoven.
John Cage was onto something, I think…
I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece… for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance… the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium.
No matter how engaging, how beautiful nor how directly music speaks to you, the outside world is always stronger. The balance of both is the ideal.
Back Home
Well, I’m back from Baltimore and managed not to get murdered or raped while there. Actually it seems like a much nicer place than I was initially led to believe. But then, we didn’t exactly venture that far out of Downtown. Anyway, there is too much stuff such as sick girlfriends going on right now to write a proper post, but tomorrow will hopefully bring useful opportunities.