(continuing the celebration of this blog’s birthday)

If you search for inspirational quotes about music, you will come up with a shitload, er, treasure trove of insipid, er, heartwarming phrases. Joking aside, it is fascinating that our species wastes so much energy on making air molecules vibrate in specific ways – so much so that some people do nothing but make music for a living (depending on your definition of “making a living“).

If cheesy phrases like “music is what feelings sound like” make your eyes roll, then I have good news for you! The great bard himself (Shakespeare) penned a poem about music in The Merchant of Venice. Many composers have set these words, but the most famous is Vaughan-Williams – a Serenade to Music.

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!
With sweetest touches pierce your mistress’ ear,
And draw her home with music.
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
The reason is, your spirits are attentive –
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Music! hark!
It is your music of the house.
Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
Silence bestows that virtue on it
How many things by season season’d are
To their right praise and true perfection!
Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion
And would not be awak’d. Soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.

The Roman god Janus is the deity of doors, gates, beginnings – basically any point that marks a transition from one state to another. The month of January is named after this god, being the start of a new year.

Tomorrow, this blog will have reached its birthday. It is now over 100,000 words – about as many as Huckleberry Finn, but only half of Moby Dick. I certainly haven’t written a great work of literature here, but even so, The Fine Art of Listening is now a rather large opus.

So as I approach this milestone, this doorway to the future, let’s take a grand, celebratory stroll through Mussorgsky‘s Gate of Kiev.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_L-FsFeR3I

We humans like to organize, categorize, and label things. This is usually a good thing. Organizing food into specific groups (meat, vegetables, grains, etc.) helps to prepare our tongues for what we are about to eat. Labelling a piece as “French Baroque” helps us know what sort of sounds we will be hearing. On the other hand, it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how social categorization of human beings can cause huge damage.

So, what about the word “modern“? Does it mean turn-of-the-20th-century, or just current/contemporary? When exactly was (or is) “modern music” written? Is it an intellectual concept rather than a time period? Or perhaps it’s just coded talk for “ugly”? I offer no answers here – the best I can do is point out that the context of the conversation changes how we use the word.

I’m imagining your average high school or college level music appreciation class. The time comes for the 20th century – “modern music”! Without a doubt, the Rite of Spring is played, and enthusiastic discussion ensues. If it’s a high school class, the performance is probably accompanied by the dancing dinos of Fantasia, while college students get to hear stories of riots, orgies, human sacrifice. What ends up happening is that the Rite ends up becoming the piece that defines what modern music is supposed to sound like. Later, when these students hear Stravinsky‘s later works (labelled “neoclassical” and “serial“), they are shocked that it sounds so completely different.

There might have been a riot at the premiere of the Rite, but not because of the ground-breaking modern sound. Five years before, Arnold Schoenberg (who, as a Jew, was labelled by the Nazis as “degenerate”) wrote his Five Pieces for Orchestra. Knowing this piece came first, the Rite almost seems like a step backwards toward romanticism. Fifty years later, Pierre Boulez would label Schoenberg as not modern enough.

Be careful with labels.

This is just the first movement. Listen to the full 5 pieces here.