Now that my girlfriend is back in school again in upstate New York, I’m finding myself on the road a lot. Subsequently I’m finding myself listening to a lot more classical music in the car these days, and much of it is music I haven’t heard before.
Today I popped over to Tower Records during lunch time and picked up two new CD’s of music that I don’t remember ever hearing before. In fact, these days I probably listen to more unfamiliar music than at any time in my life. And that raises the question of how and why any of us consciously decide to expand our listening experience, in particular when we see what looks like daunting music on a concert program.
Like most people of my age, I developed an interest in classical music as a youngster because my parents had records in the house and took me to occasional concerts. I also performed in my high school band. And when I started buying my own albums in college, like many I gravitated to the standards: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mahler, and Rachmaninoff, with a few offbeat excursions into Scriabin and Bax. Still later I heard this same music at live concerts in New York City performed by some fairly extraordinary artists. Horowitz. Rubinstein. Von Karajan. Solti. I probably thought I'd reached the absolute heights of serious music.
Yet despite how I loved, and still love that familiar music, I keep gravitating toward new listening experiences the older I get. Earlier this year it was Boulez’s “Notations” because I’d heard him conduct them at a Cleveland Orchestra concert. Today it was Copland’s Piano Sonata because I’d read a CD review, and Dvorak’s late quartets because a friend dropped a casual comment about them over the weekend. And the best part of it is the uncertainty. I thrived on most of those earlier mentioned composers the minute I first heard them. Perhaps that was unstated social influences or their overwhelming level of achievement coming through. But now I want to test my ears and sensibilities on music that might not ingratiate itself on first or even second hearing.
So back to my original interest: why am I doing this and what do I expect from it? I suppose the reason is one part of a larger answer to last week’s blogger who asked, in the wake of Katrina, what do we expect from art to begin with? On the simplest level, my own explorations give me the pleasures any new discoveries might bring. They take me out of my old habits and sometimes even shake me up a bit. But more importantly it helps me realize and think about the fact that we’ve never reached the end of art, of change, of history. We haven’t found all the valid possibilities yet, not even in Beethoven or Mozart, great as they may be. The End of History is a foolish conceit, because if it’s not true for art, it’s not true for our society. And I can prove it to myself with a couple of new CD’s. Or some of the music programs at this year’s Kimmel Center Presents.
And when I started buying my own albums in college, like many I gravitated to the standards: Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Mahler, and Rachmaninoff, with a few offbeat excursions into Scriabin and Bax.
This sentance made me giggle. Somehow I don't think many of us gravitated toward Beethoven in college. :)