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.