Classical music, as much as any other form, is about struggle, pain, and expression. Brian Shea talks about what that means to him.
History teaches us that certain types of music resonate with men more than others. According to scholar Robert Walser, early heavy metal appealed to young men in 1960s Britain during a time of high unemployment and disenfranchisement, fueling resentment towards authority that often characterizes heavy metal lyrics. Others argue that contemporary hip hop and rap respond to the same conditions, even deliberately alienating women openly misogynistic lyrics.
Classical music has never been the choice of angry young men, however, and American popular culture has treated it as pretentious and even effeminate. Powdered wigs and cryptic Italian words conspire to repel young men from exploring its relevance to their world.
I embraced classical music much later in life, even with two parents trained in the piano and the French horn. Growing up, virtually none of my male friends listened to classical on a regular basis. Even in my forties I know men who look at me with some hesitation when I tell them I now prefer classical, particularly younger men.
In the age of street-hardened rappers and pop stars who appear in court as often as on stage, the likes of Beethoven or Haydn might seem to have nothing to teach a young modern man navigating his way through the world. He typically seeks inspiration from others.
But today’s young men might be surprised to find the world in which the great composers lived made 2014 look idyllic and tame. And their music is an emotional record of how they survived it.
As George Bizet reminds us, “as a musician, I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.”
The world in which the great composers lived made 2014 look idyllic and tame. And their music is an emotional record of how they survived it.
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George Frideric Handel survived a duel with another composer only because his coat button deflected an otherwise deadly sword blow. He eventually went blind from corrective surgery performed by the same doctor who blinded J.S. Bach. Beethoven slowly went deaf, which drove him to contemplate suicide. Many of his contemporaries died penniless. In short, they suffered enormously for their art, and the more I have read about their lives, the more I can put my own into perspective with their music as my soundtrack.
They were not always balanced or likable men, burdened by flaws and neuroses that sometimes made them unbearable to friends. Beethoven splashed his head with water while composing, regularly soaking his neighbors in the apartment below. He wrote deliberately difficult pieces to irritate pianists he disliked.
Likable or not, I have grown to recognize that there will always be people smarter than I am. A number of classical composers were prodigies as young children, performing for royal courts and in concert halls at an age when I could barely control my tricycle without falling down.
And that’s okay. We all recognize the quiet embarrassment of realizing we are not the smartest in the room. How we incorporate such experiences into our lives, however, is the measure of our worth.
As a new graduate student years ago, I was slightly intimidated by many of my classmates. Most already had experience in international affairs that I had come to study. They were fluent in foreign languages and had lived abroad. I had just spent four years behind a cash register before being lucky enough to pursue a graduate degree. During a political science class, the question put before us was whether the 1949 Communist revolution in China was a true “revolution.” My classmates proceeded to debate for some time before I raised my hand.
“How are you defining ‘revolution’?” I asked.
It was not a profound, rhetorical question on my part. It had simply occurred to me that I wasn’t precisely sure of what constituted a true revolution, though my classmates seemed confident enough to begin the debate anyway. There was a long pause and then the class struggled to agree on a definition in a discussion that lasted over an hour.
Most of my classmates were smarter and more experienced than I was that day, but I realized that any individual can bring to the table perspectives not previously considered, even elementary ones. The key to learning is not thinking you are a Mozart, but knowing you are not and that you don’t need to be.
Despite their genius, the great composers faced heated criticism of their accomplishments. Some of the great composers took criticism very personally, never learning that handling criticism is itself a high art.
Some years ago I decided to write a novel, and like many writers, was hopeful it was good enough to publish. The seventy-eight literary agents who responded to my queries, however, disagreed. It can be particularly bracing to read criticism of your own art, particularly for the first time. Art is subjective, but it’s also an expression of the self, and when it’s criticized, it too often feels like an attack on the self.
One of Beethoven’s last works was described as the “work of a lunatic.” Tchaikovsky was known to refer to Johannes Brahms as a “giftless bastard.” George Bernard Shaw preferred to describe Brahms as having the “brains of a third-rate village policeman.” The Boston Gazette, in turn, described Liszt’s work as “an insult to art.”
Some composers took such harsh vitriol in stride, however, knowing that what they wrote was an honest tribute to a woman loved or an experience in their lives captured in music. Felix Mendelssohn wrote music “solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure.”
When I feel the toxin of criticism flushing my own face, I click “Mendelssohn” on my smartphone until the notes administer context and reason to my overly sensitive mind. And it works.
Centuries later, the music these men produced survives as a record of all they were; the physical pain of illness, the inebriation of love, the searing pain of loss, the victory over self-doubt, the certainty of approaching death, and the hope that their voices would persist into our futures.
Bach, Mozart, Handel, and Mahler left us a map of the human experience with the routes left blank for you to populate with your individual joy, grief, serenity, and passion.
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Every note they wrote adheres to the moment you hear it and can remain there for the rest of your life. There are no lyrics; those are for you write. Bach, Mozart, Handel, and Mahler left us a map of the human experience with the routes left blank for you to populate with your individual joy, grief, serenity, and passion.
When I was very young, my parents told me I was to have another sister. My mother was pregnant. But after nine months, my new sister never came. She was stillborn, and my parents faced the loss as any parents would.
Not long after my mother returned from the hospital, the phone rang. It was my father calling from his office, who simply told her to turn on the radio. She did, and Mozart’s Requiem was playing. No more was said. The piece had carried them through their lives as musicians and had now adhered itself to a new moment with new meanings that would accompany them from that moment forward.
Two years ago, when my sisters and I stood around my mother as she lay dying, we tried to comfort her with the classical pieces she loved. We started with the Brandenburg Concerto, which marked one of the best days of her life. As a young counselor at a music summer camp in New York State, her students hiked through the forest for a day, each young musician humming or whistling their respective part of the Brandenburg. The forest echoed the a cappella concerto and the moment would remain with my mother for the rest of her life.
Now, in her last moments, she heard it one last time. By the time Handel’s Water Music sounded in the Intensive Care Unit, we knew she would soon be gone. And, my feelings about these pieces we played for her have changed into something entirely different, from uplifting to mournful and someday, I hope, to uplifting again.
Several years ago, violinist Joshua Bell conducted an experiment in the Metro tunnels of Washington, D.C. With a $3 million violin, the master musician played classical music to the commuters rushing by. Almost all of them ignored him, not realizing his concerts command $100 a ticket or more.
At the end of the day, his open violin case contained $27 in donations.
Bell noticed that only children turned their heads to listen, including a small boy who attempted to stop before being yanked away by his mother who was determined to catch a train on time.
It saddens me that parents are pulling their sons away from violins in metro stations and it worries me that young boys are being socialized to believe such art makes them feminine or that the misogynistic music on the radio may instruct them on how to treat women.
I hope that boy in the Washington Metro frees himself from his mother’s grip the next time he hears a classical piece. I hope he has many breakfasts with Vivaldi playing in the background or smiles when he hears Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni, frantically finished during a head-splitting hangover on the morning of its premiere. I hope he reads about the composers’ lives and learns from them. Above all, I hope he ignores the smirks of his friends when he plays Schubert or Tartini.
When he is much older, the first three notes of a favorite piece may carry him back to the moment he fell in love, the heart-rending pain of loss, or a walk through the forest that became a source of serenity years later. That may not get him many phone numbers during happy hour, but it will make him a man worth remembering.
Photo—Calsidyrose/Flickr