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Tag Archives: mahler
My Mahler list
There is Mahler before Bernstein, and Mahler after him. This is not to say that Lenny is the summum bonum of these nine-plus symphonies, but that before his 1960's advocacy, Mahler was one of those niche composers that a few people knew about and appreciated, and afterwards, no right-thinking conductor could fail to offer a complete cycle — Mahler joined Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky and one of those whose works would be recorded by the yard. A Mahler program now draws a paying audience like almost no other.
But there is Mahler and there is Mahler. When everyone gets into the act, the quality level evens out — It's hard to find a really bad recording anymore, and it is also hard to stand out with something exceptional. Yet, both ends do still exist.
I have not heard every release; no one could, not even David Hurwitz, who is as close to nuts as anyone I know of. But I have experienced a whole raft of Mahler recordings and I have my favorites, and a few excrescences that I have to keep as "party records" to share with commiserating friends.
My bona fides include more than a half-century of listening to classical music, reading scores, and being a retired classical music critic on a major daily newspaper. I have owned at least 15 complete Mahler cycles and uncounted individual CDs and LPs — going back to the 1960s. I did disgorge about two-thirds of my collection of CDs when I retired eight years ago, but even since, I have added more Mahler (among others) and currently sit with 10 full sets and two shelves of individual recordings. Am I as nuts as Hurwitz? I leave that to the jury. (It isn't only Mahler: I once owned 25 complete sets of Beethoven piano sonatas and 45 recordings of the Beethoven Violin Concerto).
Yes, I listen to a boatload of music. I cannot imagine my life without music.
And I have my Top 10 list of Mahler recordings. Really, a Top 11 — one for each of the nine completed symphonies, and add-ons for the incomplete 10th, for Das Lied von der Erde, and the song cycles, so it's really like a Top 15 or so. And there are a few bombs I want to include, just for fun. Let's take them in order.
Symphony No. 1 in D
The symphony begins with an ethereal A, barely audible and transforms into a cuckoo call, evincing nature, the woods and eternity, but then opens up into the fields and streams borrowed from Ging heut' Morgen über's Feld in his song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. The first four Mahler symphonies all borrow from his songs. The third movement is a grotesquerie built from a minor-key version of Frere Jacques played first by a solo double bass; it is an ironic funeral march, interrupted by klezmer music and a bit of gypsy wedding. It is one of the most peculiar movement from anyone's symphonies.
Then it all burst out in a tormented and blazing fourth movement with horns wailing out over all, and comes to an abrupt conclusion with an orchestral hiccup.
The symphony is qualitatively different from the ones that follow, but it is easier for most first-time listeners to comprehend. It is a great place to start a Mahler journey.
The greatest version I ever heard live was Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic; it blew me away. There is a live recording, from the young maestro's debut concert in LA. It is hard to get the same effect from a recording, but this is my sentimental favorite. But there are some other great ones.
The consensus (but not universal) favorite is Raphael Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1968. It includes the Lieder eines fahrended Gesellen and Dietrich Fischer-Deiskau.
The version I first learned from, a billion years ago in another galaxy, and on vinyl, was Bruno Walter's with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Walter knew Mahler and premiered his Ninth Symphony. The sonics are not always great, but there is tremendous authority in Walter's Mahler.
Symphony No. 2 in C-minor ("Resurrection")
Many people hold the "Resurrection Symphony" as their nearest and dearest, with its uplifting finale of rebirth and optimism. But I have always found the end a touch forced and insincere, as if Mahler really, really wanted to believe in a renewed life after death, but couldn't, and could only mouth the words. "Words without thoughts never to heaven go."
Yet, its music is still magnificent, especially the first movement funeral march, which comes to a climax so disturbing and dissonant, he never matched it until the orphan adagio of his 10th symphony. The inner movements are some of the most beautiful he ever wrote and the alto solo, Urlicht, is transcendental.
Everyone, it seems, has taken a crack at the "Resurrection", including businessman Gilbert Kaplan, who learned to conduct only to lead this symphony and never conducted anything else. (OK, he did make a stab at the Adagietto from the Mahler Fifth, but that hardly counts.)
My favorite is Otto Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus. Klemperer always makes the music feel as important as it needs to be; he seems to believe in what it says, not merely to play the notes.
Symphony No. 3 in D-minor
There are some music you cannot listen to very often. Beethoven's Ninth, for instance, or the Bach Matthew Passion. They are too big, too meaningful, too overwhelming, that to maintain the sense of occasion, you can only pull them out at special moments. You have to be ready to accept what they have to offer. It is almost a religious experience.
The Mahler Third last an hour and a half. It is almost an opera without words, except there are singers. It is a full evening by itself. But if you are not in the right frame of mind, it can just seem endless. The first movement alone lasts longer than any Haydn symphony.
Mahler explained his ideas for the symphony, though he later recanted. The words are not what the symphony says, but they give an approximation. The first movement is "Pan awakes; summer marches in," and pits a relentless and ruthless nature, "red in tooth and claw," against the riotous optimism of the season of growth, in an overwhelming march of joy and hedonism.
The second movement is "What the flowers of the meadow tell me." The third is "What the animals of the forest tell me." In the fourth, an alto sings "What man tells me," in a doleful lament that "Die Welt ist tief," "The world is deep." Following that comes "What the angels tell me," with a choir and bells telling of "himmlische Freude" — heavenly joy.
But all of this, for an hour, is really prolog to the final movement Adagio, "What love tells me." It is built on a theme taken from Beethoven's final quartet and its "Muss es sein? Es muss sein." ("Must it be; it must be"). It is a 22-minute-long meditation, rising to ecstasy.
When the premiere was given in 1902, Swiss critic William Ritter wrote this finale was "Perhaps the greatest adagio written since Beethoven." If you can come away without collapsing into a puddle of weeping, you're a better person than I am.
The recording that overwhelms me more than any other, not only because of the performance, but because of its engineering and immediacy of sound quality is Riccardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw.
A nearly equal second, in slightly less perfect sound, is Leonard Bernstein's 1961 recording with the New York Philharmonic. It is the gold standard for the finale.
Symphony No. 4 in G
On the opposite end of the emotional scale — and what a relief — comes the Fourth Symphony, with its sleigh bells and Kinderhimmel. It is, without doubt, Mahler's happiest symphony. It is also his shortest. Coincidence?
But I've got a problem picking a best, because there are three performances I cannot do without, each highlighting a different aspect of the work.
First, there is Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, recorded in November, 1939. Mengelberg knew Mahler, and we have evidence that Mahler endorsed Mengelberg's interpretation of the symphony, although that endorsement came for earlier performances. Mahler died in 1912 and this recording is from 27 years later. Still, it is the best evidence we have for the way Mahler probably intended his work to sound. And, compared to the way it is played nowadays, it is ripe with violent tempo changes and swooping portamentos.
Second, there is Benjamin Zander, with the Philharmonia. In the hour-long discussion disc packaged with the performance, Zander makes the case that Mahler wanted the violin soloist in the second movement to play like a country fiddler, not a trained violinist. A "Geige," not a "Violine." He has the violinist retune his fiddle a full tone sharp to play the Totentanz — he is to be Freund Hein, or "Friend Hank," a nickname for the Grim Reaper. Zander is the only conductor to really take the composer at his word; most recordings, the soloist can't bring himself to make the ugly sounds Mahler wanted, and smooths the part's rough edges. It should sound like the Devil's fiddle in Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, with that edge.
In all his Mahler recordings, Zander is scrupulous in following the anal retentive storm of written instructions Mahler included in his scores. If this means the long-haul structure of the work is sometimes disrupted for the spotlit detail, well, that's the nature of Romanticism over Classicism. Those details were put there for a reason; we should hear them.
The third recording is Bernstein's first version, with the New York Philharmonic and soprano Reri Grist. Bernstein's Mahler is always good, but sometimes, it is the best, and this is one of those times. Grist has a fresh voice that is perfect for the innocent text of the finale, which is a child's vision of what heaven will be like ("Good apples, good pears, good grapes … St. Martha must be the cook.")
Wagner has his "bleeding chunks," and Mahler has his Adagietto. Everyone knows the Adagietto, from movies and TV commercials. But the whole symphony, the first one since the First Symphony not to have voices, is a great rumbustious tussle, from its funeral march start to its manic contrapuntal finale, where he takes five melodic fragments, stated at the outset, and combines and recombines them like a Braumeister.
The Adagietto fourth movement was, per Mahler, intended as a love letter to his wife, Alma, but is so elegiac that it has become the aural metaphor for loss and grief. Considering Alma's serial infidelities, perhaps it is only fitting that the movement has morphed in its cultural meaning. (One critic calls Mahler "a composer with a dodgy heart who married a trollop." "Alma, tell us: All modern women are jealous. You should have a statue in bronze, for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.")
The recording to have is Bernstein's second recording, with the Vienna Philharmonic. It has beautiful playing from one of the world's best orchestras, and all the energy and commitment that emanates from Lenny's spiritual leadership.
Another legendary performance is John Barbirolli's with the New Philharmonia. If you think Bernstein's fever is suspect, then reach for a cold bottle of Sir John.
Symphony No. 6 ("Tragic")
Labeling any of Mahler's symphonies as "Tragic" may seem redundant, but this is clearly his gloomiest, opening with a relentless stomp, stomp, stomp of a marche fatale and leading to the crushing hammer blows of destiny in the finale.
Nevertheless, it has what I think is an even more persuasive love letter to Alma in the slow movement, which has to be one of the most tender and lovely in all of the canon.
But Mahler never quite figured out if it should be the second or third movement, so nowadays, you find it both ways in performance, and find angry and assertive essays by critics proving once and for all it simply has to be the way they see it. Me, I like the adagio second to separate the angry first movement from the angry scherzo, which shares its rhythm with the first. Play them back to back before the adagio and it can seem like too much of the same thing. But then, that's my opinion; you are free to have yours.
Then, in the finale, Mahler never quite resolved whether there should be three hammer blows or only two. He was a seriously superstitious man and feared that a third hammer blow might prefigure his own death, and took it out of the score. But hammer blows come in threes in life — at least in Mahler's — and I prefer all three to be there. Nor did he ever quite specify what he meant by hammer blows; they are written into the score, but how should they be produced? Each orchestra is left to come up with its own solution. Some have used hammer and anvil, others have built large resonant wooden boxes hit with great wooden mallets. There's a lot of room for interpretation.
Ben Zander comes to the rescue: His recording includes both the duple and triple hammer blows. You get to choose which finale you want to hear. As usual, Zander is perfect for following Mahler's precise instructions in the score: a sforzando here, a ritardando there, a subito piano or a purposeful mix-mash of rhythms there. Now make the clarinet sound like a dying cat, now let the violins swoop with a portamento. Zander obeys where most other conductors smooth it all out to make pretty. This should not be a pretty symphony.
Guess what? Whether two or three hammer blows, Mahler didn't die after the Sixth Symphony, which may explain why the Seventh is so giddy. All the other symphonies are programmatic in some way, with funeral marches, or heroic deaths, but the Seventh is just music. Mahlerian music, which means fantastic orchestrations and effects. But no overt meaning.
It has five movements. The inner three are a scherzo sandwiched between two nostalgic sweetnesses he called "Nachtmusik," or "night music." In them, he uses rustic cowbells to symbolize — cowbells — and adds a mandolin and guitar. They couldn't be lovelier. Between them is a vicious scherzo.
But then, there's the finale, which really makes no sense at all. It's a complete hodge-podge, starting with a manic tympani solo and rushing off like a Turkish Pasha into what sounds like Ottoman grandiosity. But you have to remember the advice of the Talking Heads: "Stop Making Sense." Just enjoy the effervescent joy of it all, up to the penultimate C-augmented horn chord before the final tonic C. One of the oddest endings before Sibelius's Fifth.
The Third and the Ninth are certainly deeper and more profoundly moving, but the Seventh is my favorite for when I just want to hear Mahler without having to weep and sob and contemplate the Weltschmerz of it all.
My go-to recording is a sleeper. Daniel Barenboim is not known as a great Mahler conductor, but his recent Mahler Seventh, with Staatskapelle Berlin on Warner Classics is brilliant and one of the best engineered recordings I've heard, so you get not only a perfect performance, but a recording that sounds more like an orchestra playing live in your room than any other. He hits the crazed finale with the perfect get-on-the-roller-coaster attitude.
I've been choosing great performances to recommend, but really bad ones can be fun, too. There is a Mahler Seven that is so unbelievably bad, you just have to hear it. Otto Klemperer is — let's be honest — a really great Mahler conductor. Many of his recordings rank at the top of the list. But his Seventh is a real dog. What was he thinking? Barenboim comes in at 74 minutes. Klemp's Seventh goes on for an hour and 40 minutes. Cheez Louise. It's like Glenn Gould's Appassionata, playing it like they were sight-reading it for the first time.
Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand")
I'm afraid I have never warmed up to the Eight Symphony. Its first movement is outright hysterical — I don't mean it's funny, but rather the manic half of a bipolar cycle; and its second movement is an opera manque built on Goethe's Faust that just seems to wander without getting anywhere. Maybe I just need to listen to it another 20 times or so to get it into my head. It was Mahler's biggest popular success during his life, but it has not worn well with me.
It is a choral symphony with an alleged 1000 performers taking part, including eight solo voices, two different choruses and an organ, which blares at the beginning when it all explodes open in a "Veni creator spiritus" — "Come, Creator Spirit" — like one of those tweets typed in all caps.
It has its fans. I am happy for them. George Solti and the Chicago Symphony is a consensus recommendation and zips through it all in under 80 minutes, which is shorter than almost all other performances, and therefore qualifies it as the greatest.
Mahler had a congenital heart defect and he put its irregular rhythm into the beginning of his Ninth Symphony, an off-kilter beat that is the first thing we hear as the orchestra begins. Over that we hear the harp and muted trumpet. Added to that comes a little shiver in the strings followed by a two-note descending theme. These layers form the basis of the entire symphony, the way dot-dot-dot-dash forms the genesis of Beethoven's Fifth.
There follows an earthy Ländler as a second movement and a scurrilous Rondo Burlesque for the third. The final adagio is a kind of culmination of Mahler's death music. Instead of a funeral march or a heroic death, the music dwindles to a quiet and inevitable cessation of its heartbeat. It trails off in a morendo so still and hushed that in a good performance, you can never quite tell when the orchestra stops playing. It just dies away. The effect can be overwhelming. In some famous performances, the audience refrains from applauding for as long as five whole minutes before exhaling in bravos and cheers. It is music that strikes deep.
Bernstein made a meal of this symphony and recorded it four times, not counting a few live performances caught on tape outside the Bernstein canon. In the only time he ever performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, he recorded the Mahler Ninth. It is held in reverence by many, despite a glaring lapse by the trombone section in the finale (reputedly, an audience member sitting behind the section had a heart attack and died and the trombonists were understandably distracted). Even so, it is a powerfully emotional recording. But then, all of Lenny's Ninths carry that wallop.
If you wish to escape the Bernstein reality distortion field, there are other tremendous Ninths. Barbirolli's with the Berlin Philharmonic, from 1964, is a clear and unsentimental, but still emotional performance. Bruno Walter premiered the work in 1912, a year after Mahler's death, with the Vienna Philharmonic. He made a stereo recording with the Columbia Symphony exactly 50 years later; that recording is a benchmark for many.
It has been recorded by almost every conductor out there, up to Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw just last year.
The version I learned on was a surprisingly good version by Leopold Ludwig and the London Symphony, from 1960, on the old Everest label. I still enjoy his Ländler above most.
Symphony No. 10
Mahler never finished his Tenth Symphony, but left it in tantalizing form as piano short score. He did orchestrate the opening adagio, and until recently, the adagio was performed as a stand-alone. That piano sketch has been orchestrated since, essentially by committee, and there are now many full recordings out there.
I have never been convinced by the attempted realizations of the whole, but the adagio is absolutely scarifying. It slowly builds up to a climax that is so frightening that in a good performance, your fight-or-flight hormones should get nightmares, the hair on the back of your neck should prickle and you should feel as if the gates of hell have opened and disgorged its contents. It is a scream of pain, an Edvard Munch level scream: "Ich fühlte das grosse Geschrei durch die Natur" ("I felt the great scream in nature.")
Mahler had found out about Alma's infidelity and he scribbled in his score several pained comments about it. He was devastated and the music shows it. At one point, nearly all twelve chromatic notes are played in a single harrowing dissonance, distributed across the orchestra in a way to make a musical chord rather than simply noise, and then a screaming trumpet breaks through the din to make things even more unbearable. After that moment, things go quiet and the movement continues to its distressed end.
If you want to hear all five movements, there are many good performances, including Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. But I will cling to the adagio alone and the first version I knew — Bernstein's first with the New York Philharmonic. Any time the emotion is more to the point than the music, Bernstein conducts the emotion. This is Mahler at his most Mahlerian, and Lenny at his most Bernsteinian.
Das Lied von der Erde
After all that, if I were forced to accept having only a single work of Gustav Mahler, it would be Das Lied von der Erde ("The Song of the Earth"), a six-song cycle-symphony. Mahler had planned to publish it as his ninth symphony, but, superstitious about ninth symphonies (the final symphonies of so many composers), he refused to give it the title. When he then came to publish his next, he could name it the Ninth, knowing that fate would understand it was really his tenth.
But aside from that biographical titbit, Das Lied is an overwhelming and emotional work, even among an oeuvre that practically set the parameters for overwhelming and emotional.
Mahler's output falls into three large groups. The first four symphonies are called his "Wunderhorn" symphonies, because they make use of his settings of songs from a book of poetry called Des knaben Wunderhorn ("A Boy's Magic Horn"). The second group are his purely orchestral symphonies, numbers 4 through 7. The Eighth is sui generis and doesn't count (see above). But the final three works, the Ninth Symphony, the trunk of the Tenth and Das Lied von der Erde are profoundly inward. You get the feeling that Mahler didn't write them so much for audiences, but as a way to question his own existence.
The songs of this symphony are taken from a book of Chinese poetry, translated into German (or invented) called "The Chinese Flute." The texts investigate beauty, isolation, nature and death, and where all these intersect. "Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod."
The sixth and final song — Der Abschied ("The Farewell") — lasts as long as the first five and features some of the most ethereal orchestral writing Mahler ever penned, and a text that Mahler supplemented with several lines of his own.
"I seek peace for my lonely heart," the contralto sings. And ends, "The dear Earth everywhere/ blooms in spring and grows green anew./ Everywhere and forever blue is the horizon./ Forever … Forever."
That last word — "ewig" in German — repeats and repeats ever more silent, until it completely evaporates. It is impossible to hear it without sobbing.
The symphony was premiered by Bruno Walter in 1911, six months after Mahler's death, and Walter recorded it at least three times, in 1936, 1952 and 1960, the last in stereo. Either of the last two can be considered the one to have: Each has its champions and both are magnificent and echt Mahler.
But the one you cannot do without is by Otto Klemperer, released in 1967, with Fritz Wunderlich and Christa Ludwig. It has better sound than any of the Walters and magnificent singing. This is music right in Klemp's wheelhouse.
Warning at the outset: No single set of complete recordings is great in all of the symphonies. But having a complete set gives you a consistent vision of what the work is all about.
Bernstein recorded them all three times. The first for Columbia (now Sony), mostly with the New York Philharmonic. The second for Deutsche Grammophon, mostly with the Vienna Philharmonic. And finally, a video set, on DVD, for Unitel, mostly with the Vienna Phil. The first two are canonic, and while each cycle has its proponents, you really should have both.
Pierre Boulez is kind of the anti-Bernstein, cool and analytical, precise and controlled. For Boulez, Mahler is a 20th century composer — or at least a prefiguring, and the source of the Second Viennese School. You can hear every instrument with clarity
But is Mahler Mahler without going over the top emotionally? Klaus Tennstedt has many devotees, and falls more into the Bernsteinian camp. He recorded them with the London Philharmonic. It is a great set. I gave mine away, not because I didn't like them, but because I gave them to my best friend; he deserved them.
A sleeper among sets is David Zinman with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. It is the best engineered set I have heard and with beautiful playing by the orchestra.
There have been sets that mixed and matched conductors and orchestras. Both DG and Warners have great sets. Another, called the "People's Edition" had a promotional vote to choose which recordings to include. The fact that each set chooses from their proprietary recordings means that there is no agreement on what are the best recordings. Everyone, after all, has their opinion. In Mahler-World, opinions are strong.
Other conductors have less-than-complete boxes out there. Klemperer only recorded Symphonies 2, 4, 7, 9 and Das Lied von der Erde. His No. 2 and Das Lied are consensus choices for best ever. The Seventh is just awful, but you should hear it anyway.
Hermann Scherchen has a box with all but the Fourth and no Das Lied. He recorded with second-rate orchestras, for the most part, and is often so wayward his interpretations have been called "Variations on Themes by Mahler." The sound engineering is highly variable. This one is for specialists only.
In the BB list ("Before Bernstein"), you get to hear all nine symphonies with Ernest Ansermet and the Utah Symphony and hear what they sound like before the current Mahler Tradition was assembled (largely by Lenny). They are surprisingly good, and you get a different slant on the music (less peculiar than Scherchen's).
Benjamin Zander and the Philharmonia has not yet recorded the Seventh or Eighth, but the rest are among my favorites and I listen to them often. More than any other conductor, Zander follows Mahler printed directions accurately, and brings out expressive details glossed over in other recordings. There are those who disparage Zander for this detail orientation, but for me, it is the heart of a Romantic interpretation. This is the way they were played under Mahler, I am convinced. I love them all. And each comes with an hour-long lecture, explaining many of the details. He is a great speaker as well as conductor.
There are others: Chailly, Bertini, Gielen, Sinopoli, Rattle. And all have their merits.
The sets just keep coming. Everyone gets into the act. I have not been anywhere near complete.
But these are the ones I have come to love. And, of course, there are many individual recordings, not part of sets. And many of these are among the greatest.
And I have not even mentioned the other song cycles. Maybe another time.
Pan awakes
Like most everyone else, I have been bunker hunkering, like some 1920's gangster, holed up in a house, fearful of each approaching human. And like most everyone else, a bit of cabin fever intrudes. I peek out the window and see a yard across the street with a Bradford pear tree like a snowstorm of white, and the lawn is beginning to get unkempt. The temperature has moderated and the sky is filled with crisp, dry air. And so, I have to get out.
For me, the best solution is to drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its entrance is only a few hundred yards from my house. I can stay sealed up in the car but find a place where the horizon is still marked by the distance where the curvature of the earth bends the rest down and away from my sight. When you are stuck at home, it is easy to think of the planet as consisting of four walls; things are cubicular and static. But get out into the mountains, up high where you see for such a length, and you are again standing on the apex of a globe. Everything falls away from you, both geographically and emotionally. Anxiety thins.
This century has redefined nature. In the 19th century of Thoreau and Emerson, nature was green and pleasant. To Emerson, nature was the outer manifestation of deity. Earlier, to Wordsworth, "There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/ Appareled in celestial light."
To Byron nature was so vast not even humankind could mar it. Our century has proven him wrong. For us, nature can no longer be the birds and beasties, the green leaves and burbling streams, the sky above and the soil below. We have filled the oceans — where Byron said man's control "stopped with the shore" — with tangles of plastic waste the size of islands. In our cities, we have turned the transparent air into murk. We have left our rivers thick with the runoff of pigpens.
The television nature programs I grew up with, that showed us the wildebeest swarming on the veldt and the flying squirrel gliding from tree to tree, have turned into chronicles of rapine and threatened extinction. Those documentaries are now alarums to wake the public to what it is losing.
The Antarctic ice is thinning, the oceans are swelling, the bees are coughing and the once myriad cod have turned into shriveling shoals. It is hard to think of nature the way I did when I was young.
"There hath past away a glory from the earth."
When I was in my 20s (which was 50 years ago), I was a bird watcher, a hiker, a camper, an amateur astronomer and a gardener. I knew the name of every tree and wildflower or weed. I had an almost mythic connection to the earth: It glowed every day, like a van Gogh painting, buzzing and whirling. Every bush was the burning bush. A surge of brain chemicals blasted my emotions. I was giddy. Now, half a century later, it is not now as it hath been of yore. "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" "At length the Man perceives it die away,/ And fade into the light of common day."
Career and responsibilities, the vicissitudes of living, the betrayals of love and the deaths of those we loved, have all risen to take too much space in our journals. And so, in my senescence I have drawn away from what we used to call nature, and that selfsame nature has itself decayed and left me.
But not completely. I drive up the road into the hills, through the tunnels, into the high country where the sun shines and the wind blows the shadows of clouds across the flanks of the peaks. It is April and the dogwoods become galaxies of stars against the darker, still-leafless trees behind them. When I look down at the valleys, I see in the lower elevations the bright young leaves swelling from the buds. It is certainly beautiful, but it isn't just beauty that makes this important.
We are facing a new virus and most of us, and especially those of us on the shorter end of life's measuring stick, feel an immediate threat. We may die. We always knew that, but now we can almost touch it and taste it on our fingertips. It is not theoretical.
And so, I get out of my car in a roadside pullout and look down from the mountain into the woods beside the road and see the fresh buds and the tree branches that sway and the shoots springing tip first through the forest litter and I know that it is another spring, my seventy-second, and one more of millions that make a wake behind the present going back before there was any consciousness to know it. On the uphill side of the road there are stony outcroppings and those folded strata tell me of eons of continuity.
I have heard, as you have, poets and essayists talk about the importance of nature, and I have at times winced at what seemed to me the perfervid sentimentality of such bromides. After all, everyone knows, or else, should know, that if nothing drastic is done, we're all going to hell and taking the world with us. The news is 24 hours a day bad, or at least the talking heads tell us so. Over and over.
But when I go to the woods, it is quiet except for the "small fowls that make melody and sleep all night with open eye." And the hurly-burly slows and I am forced to know that there is a rhythm that is not that of CNN, that whether it is plague or influenza or corona virus, we have inhaled and exhaled this pestilence before, that the world endures, with me or without me. My frame of reference, like my horizon, expands.
So, it isn't the simple beauty of the natural world that does me needed good. Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony has six movements and they include such titles as "What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me," "What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me," and ends with "What Love Tells Me." And what they all join to say is a harmony and a flow. And so, as I drive along the Parkway, I listen to that music on the CD player and the outside and inside, the world and my thoughts and feelings, all twine together into a singularity, mind as mirror to the world, and world as mirror to mind. Pan awakes, Summer marches in.
Click any image to enlarge
Rising green
The Swannanoa River runs in western North Carolina from the town of Black Mountain to Asheville. It is where I live now, and it is spring.
As I drive through the valley, with the Swannanoa Mountains directly to the south and, further north, in the distance, the lofty Black Mountains — the highest east of the Mississippi — the lower slopes of the Swannanoas are green, the bright green of early spring. The mid slopes are what Robert Frost wrote about: "Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold." And the tops of the peaks are still the dusky grey-black of winter. You can see spring climbing up the mountains. The green-line moves fast; a few days ago, it was all grey. Tomorrow, the line will be hundreds of feet higher up the slope, chewing up the grey, until it is all consumed in green. In their half-world, the hills look almost iridescent, the way draped satin will pick up the highlights and shimmer.
And all the while, I have Mahler's Third playing and — I didn't plan this; it's just what was in the CD player — the first movement culminates in a great joyous march that is meant to describe the triumphant return of spring; all the animals and plants, all the hills and rivers are marching in procession like Mummers. It was overwhelming. I almost had to pull over and stop. Luckily, I hit a traffic light. I could steal a look to the left and soak in the iridescence and the utter, unutterable beauty of it all. De Welt is schoen.
I will be heartbroken to leave it when my time comes.
It used to be that January turned to February and February turned to March — and so on. Then, as I got older, it was January-July-January-July. Now, it is January-January-January. I don't know why time speeds us so in senescence. I think, May is so far off, I don't have to decide anything yet, then, all of a sudden, it is May again. The earth spins around the sun like a propeller.
It never stops; it only speeds up. Existence is not a thing but a process: nature is a verb, not a noun. It is never the same river; it is always the same flow. The green climbs up the hillside; my years shrink in front of me. I have now seen countless leaves sprout, green, shrivel and fall, and countless lives. The loss builds up and each spring slightly more wistful, more sad and the joyful march of plants and animals, hills and rivers deeper and more grief-laden. All rolled up into a single procession, full to bursting.
Die Welt ist tief; tief ist ihr Weh.
I have an interesting "contest" going on with my granddaughter, Tallulah Rose. She is 16 and immersed in music, taking guitar, piano and banjo lessons; she has some genuine talent. When I chauffeur her around on those occasions when I am called on, and am playing some Bach or Beethoven on the car CD, she is apt to say something like, "Classical music is so boring; it all sounds the same." And, of course, when I hear her listening to pop music on her iPad, my reaction is the mirror: Pop music is so boring; it all sounds the same. So, I scratch my head and wonder.
How can something sound so monotonous to me and not bore her to tears? How can something so varied and glorious as classical music possible sound to her as if it is all the same gluey mush? It is more than a question of taste; we are clearly hearing different things.
Most people are likely to think of this as merely a matter of taste — "I like indie rock, but she likes country," — and it is, to some degree — but while someone who likes Taylor Swift may say they don't like Justin Bieber, they recognize it as merely a different genre of pop, and they wedge into their corner of sound comfort. Is there anything more insular than heavy metal?
But classical music doesn't seem to function to Tallulah Rose as just one more Billboard magazine chart category, like soul or country-Western or hip hop. Those are all options out there for popular consumption and one chooses the category one feels most simpatico with.
But classical seems to be a different species altogether. It isn't, for its serious listeners, just one more entertainment option. Its goals are elsewhere.
Tallulah Rose and I thought we might explore this question. She suggested an exchange. She would choose 10 pieces of pop music for me to listen to and I would choose 10 pieces of classical music for her. Tallulah Rose isn't one of your ordinary junk-music fans: She has high standards for her music and would consider the bands she has chosen for me to be "art," or at very least music that no one of any musical sophistication would be embarrassed to be heard listening to. She has excellent taste in her music. She picked for me music by Wilco, Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie, among others. I was to listen to her music and write about it, and she was to do the same for my choices.
What T-Rose chose for me:
1. Jesus, Etc. by Wilco
2. Australia by The Shins
3. Hannah Hunt by Vampire Weekend
4. Ragged Wood by Fleet Foxes
5. Wake Up by Arcade Fire
6. Young Folks by Peter Bjorn & John
7. Little Black Submarines by The Black Keys
8. This Charming Man by The Smiths
9. Missed the Boat by Modest Mouse
10. Dance Yrself Clean by LCD Sound System
Bonus track: Title and Registration by Death Cab for Cutie
In choosing music for her, I felt it only fair that I not bury her under the Bruckner Fifth or the Mahler Third, but try to find pieces of reasonable length, and I chose several movements instead of whole concertos or symphonies. Her music for me tends to run between 3 and 5 minutes. Here is my list for her (She snuck in an extra for me, so I added one extra Mahler track for her):
1. Gabrieli — Canzon Septimi Toni No. 2 for brass choirs
2. Bach — Prelude and Fugue in c-minor from WTC Book 1
3. Mozart — First movement of the Piano Concerto No. 20 in d-minor
4. Beethoven — Third movement from the "Tempest" sonata, Op. 31, no. 2
5. Chopin — Mazurka Op. 30, no. 4
6. Brahms — Finale of the Fourth Symphony
7. Mahler — Two songs: Wer hat das Liedlein erdacht? from Das Knaben Wunderhorn and Ging heut Morgen ubers Feld from Songs of a Wayfarer
8. Rachmaninoff — Finale from Piano Concerto No. 3
9. Villa Lobos — First movement from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
10. Copland — Fanfare for the Common Man
I have listened four times through to all of T-Rose's music and I can say that none of them is musically unsophisticated, but neither can I say, outside the LCD Sound System's Dance yrslf Clean, which actually does something with the music, that they engage my deepest sympathies. Again, I am convinced that my music and hers simply are not attempting the same thing.
For a start, her music's appeal depends greatly on the lyrics. Even when I read rock criticism in, say Rolling Stone, the criticism is less about the music qua music, and more about the quality of the words. The sentiment expressed is expressed verbally, not musically. (More on lyrics later).
Second, the parts of music that seem most treasured by the rock and pop listener is a consistent beat, often aggressively propulsive. Following that, it is a melody — although in contemporary pop music, melody sounds more like chant than tune — prosody is so slipshod that the same melodic note can sustain a single syllable or three or four, if that is what the words demand.
For my classically oriented ear, the unrelenting rhythm is monotonous; I keep hoping it will lead to something, but it doesn't. For my ear, harmony is paramount. I am always aware of it, shifting from major to minor, or to a Phrygian mode or the endless unresolved but constantly yearning dissonances of atonal or serial music. I am always aware — more than the melody at the top of the orchestral heap — of the bass line. I remember Brahms saying when he got a new piece of music to look at, he'd cover up the top staves and look at the bass line. That way, he said, he could tell if the music was good or not. When I listen to popular music, the bass line is generally undistinguished, often repetitive, and rather more in the way of a continuo — a second reinforcement of the beat slammed out by the drums and cymbals.
When I say her music and mine are not doing the same thing, I mean, in part, that the music part of her music is meant to be a place to drop her head into for a few minutes, to grok on a pulse, while the verbal part is there to express, often elliptically, the concerns of a young mind. At worst, in the kind of pop music T-Rose wouldn't be caught dead listening to, those concerns are numbingly conventional, but even the more sophisticated lyrics speak to the exaggerated optimism or cynicism of adolescence, the need to be appreciated as wise and knowing, even when those of us who have been through it already, now recognize those attitudes as pose.
Slight digression: The question of pose is most obvious in the many band photos used for PR or for CD covers. The musicians look so serious and world-wise: You can't put anything over on them. But you can run through hundreds of photos and they all seem to be the same people: surly faces, collars drawn up, hands in their pockets standing in a warehouse district street to prove their working-class origins. One can't help recognize the same memes from the Angry Young Men of England in the 1950s and '60s. It's as if every band has seen photos of John Osborne and wants to be Richard Burton from Look Back in Anger or Tom Courtney from Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The straight-jacket of the meme is limiting.
Vampire Weekend: More hands in pockets
Back to the main issue: The music of rock and pop seems meant to create a pervasive mood throughout the length of a song — and except for a few experiments, all this music falls into the 3 to 5 minute song form.
Classical music, on the other hand, revels in contrast: The tempos keep changing, vigorous first themes alternate with quiet second themes. An established key center is disrupted by a series of wrenching modulations only to be reaffirmed. Instead of a single simple emotion, there is a constant development of emotions. When I find T-Rose's music boring, what I mean is it doesn't grow — but then, it's not meant to. And one of the things she finds boring in my music is that it never settles down into something she can depend on, to give her that one single, clear emotion she wants from her tune.
Another thing: For her music, as I said, the words are paramount. The music behind the words seems to function more like the music in a film: to underline the sentiment, but not to express it directly. Something interesting to hear while the "real" action is happening in the words. For my music — at least for the big 19th century pieces that make up the bulk of the repertoire — the music attempts to make an argument from start to finish, like the slow shift from c-minor to C major in Beethoven's Fifth, or the chapters of Mahler's Third, "What the fields tell me," "What the birds tell me," "What love tells me." It works like an opera, telling a story — musically — from start to finish. To hear its meaning, you have to be aurally sensitive to changes in harmony, in orchestration, in dynamics, in the ways the themes change and grow. The way you hear the E-flat arpeggiated tune at the beginning of the Eroica changes from a closed-off, harmony-denying drop to its D-flat in the third bar to that bright, victorious arpeggio in the recap and coda, where the same tune ends on the upper B-flat dominant that seems to rise above all the violence and disaster of the previously heard music. Classical music is about development; pop music seems to be about stasis.
Arcade Fire: yet again — hands in pockets
I write as if I think classical music is superior to pop music — and I would be lying if I didn't fess up to that prejudice — but that is not what I'm writing about here. Rather than argue that one music is superior, I'm saying their goals are so different, so at odds, that it is almost silly to compare them at all. One might as well compare apples to double-entry bookkeeping.
But I wanted to note something interesting about the words in the music T-Rose gave me.
The conventions of prosody have shifted dramatically. In the "old days" — as recently as the Beatles — words were written as poetry and scanned with regular meter, and carefully crafted to fit the tunes. In this, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were no different from Oscar Hammerstein II. Think of such lyrics as, "I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me." Every accented word drops on every accented note, with the weaker beats hitting off-beats in the tune. A comfortable fit. The same with "Some enchanted evening," or "I'm gonna wash that man right outa my hair."
"Blackbird singing in the dead of night…" or "You should see Polythene Pam, she's so good lookin' she looks like a man."
Even the Rolling Stones followed the conventions: "I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes; I have to turn my head until the darkness goes."
This is what Robert Frost would call playing tennis with a net.
Playing with the net can bring delightful surprise and pleasure. Think of, "In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes."
Words and music: Hand in glove.
But listen to the songs T-Rose gave me, and something different is happening: First, the words don't scan; they are more like snippets of prose. Some words have a strong beat, others fit in the space between, no matter how many or how few syllables. They just cram into whatever space is left for them.
The song is designed around a short, repeated pattern of notes that are memorable, or are meant to be memorable. The words fill in the interstices and the music is a mortar between the word-bricks. (This method would seem to derive from the blues, with its statement and licks, but they no longer follow the 12-bar harmonic pattern of the blues).
"You'll be damned to pining through the windowpanes,/ You know you'd trade your life for any ordinary Joe's,/ Well do it now or grow old,/ Your nightmares only need a year or two to unfold."
There's no regular rhythm to the words. But over and over in these songs, I do hear a pattern, and it is a surprising "revenant" from the past: It is the pattern of Medieval English verse — the four-beat line split in half with a caesura, or pause. Like The Seafarer or Piers Ploughman, the lines come with heavy stresses counted, but unstressed syllables come willy-nilly, and always that pause in the middle.
"I looked on my left side (pause) as the lady me taught
and was aware of a woman (pause) worthily clothed."
Think of the line by Pope: To err is human; to forgive, divine."
Then try these lines from Ragged Wood, by Fleet Foxes:
"Come down from the mountain (pause) you have been gone too long
The spring is upon us (pause) follow my ornate song."
If Norwegian Wood had been written by Wilco, no doubt its words would be something like: "I got a girl (pause) She had me."
(I doubt this is in any way a conscious or even unconscious DNA reappearing in pop music from the distant past, but rather that there is something meaningful in such a line that means it can reappear like convergent evolution that makes a marsupial Dingo look like a canine. Anyway, I'm sure I'm over-analyzing that habit.)
The pattern occurs in song after song that T-Rose gave me. With this one variation. In some songs, the two-beat (pause) two-beat is followed by a closing three-beat line. The Black Keys' Little Black Submarine:
"I should've seen it glow (pause) But everybody knows
That a broken heart is blind" (three beats).
(In conventional prosody, "I should've seen it glow" would scan at three beats — "I SHOULD have SEEN it GLOW" — but with the music under it, it has only two beats: "I SHOULD've seen it GLOW.")
It's a whole different prosody; a whole nother esthetic.
I have listened yet again to the songs on T-Rose's list, and I can hear many interesting bits in them. I even came to think very highly of the music in Dance yrself Clean — it actually goes somewhere. But overall, I'm stuck where I began: Popular and rock music — even indie music — is too simple musically, too repetitive, too harnessed in its beat, and written with lyrics created under an esthetic that I am simply too old to be simpatico with. I can respect it, but I cannot enjoy it.
I think the same for Tallulah Rose: I believe, on her part, she has already given up on Bach and Copland. I have not heard anything from her about it.
The ultimate end
"It doesn't matter how badly they played," said my old mentor, Dimitri, "if the symphony ends with a lot of loud, rousing brass, it will get a standing ovation."
It is the end of a symphony, more than anything that has gone before, that leaves the most vivid impression on its audience. And I don't mean the coda of the finale, but those last repeated chords that hammer home the end, those tonic, dominant, tonic, dominant tuttis that were so viciously lampooned by Eric Satie in his Embryons Deséchés.
Sometimes they never seem to be willing to give up and let you go home. Beethoven's Fifth is the poster child for this cliche (not that it was a cliche when the composer first did it).
But ever since, the bringing home the tonic key and signing off a 45-minute symphony has been left to block chords pounding our ears.
There are exceptions, of course, and there are many examples of composers doing something interesting, surprising and creative with those end notes.
Here are my top five symphony conclusions:
Brahms, Symphony No. 2 in D, op. 73 — This is the symphony that Dimitri meant when he talked about rousing brass. No symphony comes close to the exciting, fresh, explosive yelling-it-out in ecstasy rah-rah that winds up this monument. It's already loud and compelling when the trumpets, horns and winds sing out a quadruple-repeated and harmonized Nachschlag (turn) and do it again a third higher (first yellow arrow in the score). The audience is going "whoopee" and then the trombones and bass trombone hit and hold a D-major chord (which Brahms particularly marks fortissimo) over the staccato final chords of the rest of the orchestra, and finally resting on a tutti D. Wow. You always want to stand up and cheer at the end — which audiences habitually do.
Haydn, Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp, "Farewell" — Modern instruments can negotiate most keys fairly well, but in Haydn's day, F-sharp was a pretty out-there key, which made this symphony strange sounding to begin with. There was an extra bite of instruments that could not quite play easily in key. This is the only symphony Haydn wrote in this orphan key. It is a "Sturm und Drang" symphony, full of sound and fury, accentuated by the odd key choice, but the finale ends in a whimper, not a bang. It is the opposite of the Brahms. In fact, Haydn has the instruments stop playing, one by one, and walk off the stage, leaving only two violins at the end playing a simple A-sharp below an F-sharp, as the concertmaster blows out the candle that would have illuminated his sheet music. A visually dramatic end, and a musically audacious feat.
Sibelius, Symphony No. 5 in E-flat, op. 82 — Silence is the astonishing surprise at the end of Sibelius's Fifth, also, but loaded in between otherwise standard cadential chords. It was a really audacious thing to do — bring the symphony to a rousing climax and then stop everything for five beats, then hit another chord and wait again. Over and over at the end, with irregular silences between the bang-chords. If you count them, you can see the rests are oddly spaced, which gives the music a real off-balance feeling, like you cannot know what to expect. If you count out the rests in quarter-note time and the outbursts of tutti, you get: 1-2-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-Bang, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-Bang, 1-2-3-Bang. (When he wrote the first draft of the symphony, those rests were filled in with noodling in the orchestra, the effect was bland, but he left these "black holes" there instead and blew the minds of his audience.)
Mahler, Symphony No. 9 — The last notes of Mahler's final symphony, after 80 minutes of angst and rancor, are marked "ersterbend," "dying." The last two pages of the symphony take a full six minutes to play, attenuated and stretched to the limit of concentration by player and audience alike. They are orchestral whispers — death-bed speech as the music quietly accepts death. When played with the proper attitude, the audience greets the final silence not with applause, but with hush. In Amsterdam in 1995, when Claudio Abbado played it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Mahler Festival, the audience stayed silent for several literal minutes before any applause, each member gazing into his or her own private abyss before coming back to reality and applauding the performance.
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 15 in A, op. 141 — This has to be one of the most peculiar symphonies in the repertoire, with its quotation of the Lone Ranger tune from Rossini's William Tell in the first movement, and turning Wagner's Tristan und Isolde into a waltz in the finale. But the final moments of the symphony are a complete enigma: Over a hushed pedal point in the violins, which goes on for two minutes, the percussion ding, snap and clang quietly in a mechanical tick-tock over and over, with xylophone, woodblock, castanets, glockenspiel, tympani, snare drum and triangle until a final C-sharp (the third of the tonic A-major chord) dings a final punctus, sounded on glockenspiel and celeste. What was Shostakovich thinking? He never explained. He smiled like the Cheshire cat.
One last note — There is one symphony ending that has a surprising finish that you almost never hear. It is buried under a welter of excited sound. When the chorus sings its final "Götterfunken" at the end of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the coda that follows builds up steam quickly and drives home to a final D major chord. It is in the final chords that Beethoven hides an extra fillip: He has his fiddles, which are already racing as fast as they can go, double the number of notes they have to play — dig-ga-dig-ga to diggadada–diggadada — and the tympani doubles its speed, too. This detail is usually buried in the overwhelming drive of the rest of the orchestra, but one recording makes the change clear: a 1967 recording by Leopold Stokowski and the London Symphony, originally released on a London Phase 4 LP, with singers Heather Harper, Helen Watts, Alexander Young and Donald McIntyre. Its drive is overwhelming.
5 Things to know about Classical Music
It's odd, considering how old much of it is, that classical music is so recent an invention.
We think of classical music as being longhair music written by dead White guys. But, in fact, Mozart didn't know he was writing classical music. He was just writing music.
"There's only two kinds of music: good and bad," jazz icon Duke Ellington said. (Mozart is in the first group.)
Bu something changed over the centuries: As mass audiences grew to like popular music, the kind of music written by the older composers was relegated to a new category: classical.
"Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune," humorist Kin Hubbard wrote in the 1920s.
And, increasingly, audiences diverged; one group went to the dance halls, the other to the concert halls. Classical music became marginalized, especially in American culture. It became a target for the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny.
Yet a hunger for music that addresses larger and more complex issues has always existed alongside fiddle tunes. Even in the world of rock music, some music is understood to be more important than others. Radiohead has serious fans that would look down their noses at, say, Justin Bieber.
The distinction should be made, not so much between classical and pop musics, but between music created primarily as an entertainment and music that attempts to express more profound human issues.
There's nothing wrong with entertainment. We all love a good song. But it isn't the only thing there is. And we should not judge the one by the standards of the other.
Everyone knows what to listen for in popular music. They have a lifetime of dealing with it. The beat, the tune, the words, the instant gratification.
Rock music now has the "wow" factor, the light and spectacle. And now that's what people expect, to be bowled over emotionally, to get their juices pumping.
Classical music is emotional, too, but it's more interior and subtle. And it's dramatic in ways audiences just aren't familiar with anymore.
Drama is the key word: Like a play or a film, classical music deals with multiple characters (called themes) as they interact over time, and where you start isn't where you end. Like I've written before: Classical music is movies for the ear.
Popular music is a place; classical music is a journey.
Listen to Mahler and one movement may take 45 minutes. But there are so many ideas juxtaposed in so many different ways that your mind starts spinning. You connect A to B and then A to C and then C to F. It's all interacting in different ways.
You have to come to the concert hall prepared for that journey. You have to come equipped.
There are five important ways classical music differs from pop.
* Its length.
Classical music is almost always longer, In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida notwithstanding. Pop music may be likened to music videos, classical to a full-length feature. The plot takes longer to develop.
* Its dependence on harmony both structurally and expressively.
A sonata is built on D-major or F-minor, and the elaborate and subtle changes in harmony are both the structural and expressive content of classical music. You don't need to know the name, but you feel the changes of harmony in your chest, physically.
* Its reliance on variety and contrast.
Unlike pop, which sustains a single clear mood, classical moves constantly, now fast, now slow; now loud, now a whisper. It seldom keeps a single mood for long, but asks you to compare and contrast.
* Its multiple simultaneous voices, or counterpoint.
Whether it's a fugue or a quartet, there almost always is more than one thing going on at any given moment. You have to be able to hear two or more things at once.
* And finally, on the importance of "active listening."
That is, the importance of paying attention and following ideas as they change and develop through the course of the piece.
Memory is the important part. You need to have a musical memory of some kind to distinguish between what happened before and what happens now.
You have to pay attention, the way you would when reading a novel, keeping track of what's happening to Raskolnikov at any given time and how he changes over time.
Of all these things, harmony is the hardest to discuss in words. There is no non-musical language to express the modulation from D-major to A-flat. You have to hear it.
Or you try to describe it in words that can't possibly mean anything to a non-musician: An enharmonic shift, followed by a run around the circle of fifths. How about the Neapolitan relationship? Does that mean anything to you? Didn't think so. But you can hear it without naming it. Like the way you can hear the "changes" in 12-bar blues. You can feel when the phrase starts anew, with each round of chord changes.
It's only more extreme when you follow the same kind of repeating chord changes in the finale of Brahms' Fourth Symphony: You feel the drive of those harmonies racing to the finish line.
Harmony is the emotional effect created by playing several notes at once as a single idea. It also is the movement from one set of notes to another, and the emotional effect created by that shift.
Western music has the idea of expectation and release in it. Play a dominant-seventh chord and then try to stop. You can't do it comfortably. You have to have it resolve.
Harmony, more than rhythm, provides the forward motion of classical music.
Of course, pop and classical aren't mutually exclusive genres. It's more of a spectrum of intent: There is pop that tackles serious issues and there is classical music meant merely to entertain.
And there are many classical musics from around the world: Indian, Chinese — and for many of us, American jazz — are classical musics. They all tend to be longer and more complex than the popular music from those same cultures.
Classical music isn't only music with violins and oboes. It can be made with synthesizers or electric guitars, as any fan of Philip Glass or Steve Reich knows. Classical is not a style but an approach; not a sound but a way of thinking about music and what music means.
If all this makes classical music sound like work, well, it is. It requires more from the listener. But there is a reward for all the effort you put in.
It reaches depths of our souls that everyday music just doesn't.
And it satisfies the hunger that poet William Carlos Williams defined: something that is difficult, but "men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
Popular music deals with thoughts and emotions that are understood and already defined; classical attempts to understand things that we don't yet fully grasp: the big questions of life and existence that don't have simple answers.
Like all fine art, it seeks rather than finds, it defines questions rather than provides answers.
It's a richer experience, and some people gravitate into it with age and maturity. People can graduate from pop to classical music, but it seldom happens the other way round.
In Shelley's Ode to a Nightingale, he reminds us that "our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." And in classical music, our greatest symphonies, quartets, sonatas and trios all give us a complex emotional universe — and the greater the music, the more likely it will contain heavy, dark, profound and difficult emotions. When it's doing its job, a symphony is not background music.
You can go through it all: Even music that is ostensibly about joy tends to be about a kind of manic fervor or about the transcendence of the pains of mortal life — not simple happiness. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," for instance, is so over the top, that sometimes you just want to say, "Boy, get a grip."
Happiness would seem to be the province of the popular song — Feelin' Groovy, or Irving Berlin's Blue Skies (you should hear Duke Ellington's take on that one in Blues No End). What you feel coming out of a performance of Mahler's Third Symphony is something different — rung out, depleted yet renewed, taken through the paces of all of life. Happiness is irrelevant. Beethoven's Fifth, Brahms' First, Tchaikovsky's Pathetique, Mozart's Jupiter — They are all large, complex and attempts at metaphor for the joys and pains of being alive.
"Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught."
But mere happiness? You can look long and wide to find anything that simple in classical music. And yet …
And yet, as I was driving to the store the other day, with Brahms' First Serenade in the CD player, I felt a swelling of pure happiness as I listened. The music flew by with a genuine joie de vivre, a thought you rarely think when Brahms comes along. Johannes is all gravitas, Weltschmerz, longing — it used to be joked of Brahms that when he is happy, he sings, "The grave is my joy."
But here he is, without a thought in his head, spinning out tunes of unreflexive pleasure. The horns and clarinets seem to dance their way through the six movements, with no angst over whether the G-major of this theme leads to the e-minor of that one, or whether the rising fourth here is balanced by a descending fifth in the finale. None of it, just tunes. Bouncy, happy tunes. Who knew Brahms had it in him.
And I began to consider other pieces in the standard repertoire that might share something of this simplicity, this sheer pleasure in the notes — that feeling of walking along on a sunny day with some spare change in your pocket, knowing you will see your sweetie in the evening and whistling a happy chune.
Could I list at least 10 such compositions: It was a challenge I set myself.
First up, of course, come Schubert's "Trout" quintet. No one has ever written so many hummable tunes in a single piece of music, from beginning to end, pure forward-moving bouncy, danceable melody. It is the counterweight to that other quintet, the string quintet that seems to bind up in its aching arms all the sorrow and pain of the world. In the "Trout," there is none of that, only hope and pleasure and everything that a major key can shout.
Did Beethoven ever write anything so worry-free? Beethoven had bigger fish to fry. He was busy creating a new century. And yet …
Buried in that treasure hoard of piano sonatas — the so-called "New Testament" of piano literature — there is one tiny sonata in G-major, op. 78 — alla Tedesca — that has nothing but bounce and verve. It is short, clever, witty and fun. Not your usual Beethoven adjectives.
Haydn, of course, is the fountain here. You can pick almost any of his works and find acres of wit, bounce, pleasure and fun. There are his more profound moments, but pick any symphony in the 60s or 70s and you can run from start to finish with a smile in your heart. When I want to feel good, I snap in a Haydn symphony to listen to.
For instance, the Symphony No. 73 in D, "La Chasse," which ends with a fox hunt, a rousing ride through the countryside with horn and hounds.
Or the Symphony No. 60 in C, "il Distratto," which has a joke larded into it every 11 bars — you never have to wait long for another one, like a New York City bus. There's the place where he stops and has the orchestra retune, right in the middle of the finale; there's the second theme in the first movement, that just stops in its tracks harmonically and seems to fall asleep. But it isn't the jokes, per se, that I am touting here, but the sheer joy of the music, unalloyed with anything like "the saddest thought."
If you want to find the same music, but in a 19th century idiom, you have it in Georges Bizet's Symphony in C, which he wrote when he was a mere stripling of 17. It begins with joie and ends with enthusiasm and in between it is stuffed with buoyancy and energy. You cannot listen to it without it putting a bounce in your step.
I had the pleasure of seeing the New York City Ballet perform George Balanchine's Symphony in C at the Palais Garnier in Paris, and I couldn't tell which thrilled me more, the choreography or the music. It is one of the high points of my esthetic life and kept me smiling for days, even weeks.
You get something of the same confident buoyancy in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, written as a virtuoso piece for orchestra, and everyone gets to join in the party. No shadow hangs over the music — it is all joy.
The 20th century is a sorry one, filled from end to end with war, murder, oppression and genocide. But there are points of light in the music. Prokofiev may have the three great "War Sonatas," with all the weight of the world on them, but he started out with his Classical Symphony, which is a nod back to the music of Haydn, but with all the hot sauce of Modern dissonance tossed in for spice. The music bounces its way from the get-go. You can't have a heavy thought while listening to it.
And Paul Hindemith — who used to count as one of the big three of Modern music with Stravinsky and Schoenberg (how the mighty have fallen) — joins my list with his Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber. He is helped out, of course, with the jaunty tunes that he culled from Weber, but he costumes those tunes with the happiest, bounciest orchestrations and developments.
And finally, to round out my self-assigned Ten, there is the verve and sass of Darius Milhaud's Le boeuf sur le toit, which is 15 minutes of toe-tapping polytonality based on dance tunes from Brazil and named after a cabaret in Paris where the avant-garde met and drank and did their best to show off to each other. Listen to the music once and you will not be able to get it out of your head for days — or out of you hips, knees and feet. Not a care in the world.
The cares of the day will come back, as they always do, and even such happiness as embedded in this music can wear out its welcome, joyful, but a bit thin compared to the Big-Boy cousins in the concert hall, but for a moment, like that happiness you feel skipping down the street on a good day, it seems like all the world needs.
Here's my list. Please add to it or make your own:
–Symphony No. 60 in C "il Distratto" by Joseph Haydn
–Symphony No. 73 in D "la Chasse" by Joseph Haydn
–Piano Sonata No. 25 in G, op. 79 "alla Tedesca" by Ludwig van Beethoven
–Piano Quintet in A, op. 114, D. 667 "Trout" by Franz Schubert
–Symphony No. 1 in C major by Georges Bizet
–Serenade No. 1 in D, op. 11 by Johannes Brahms
–Capriccio Espagnol, op. 34 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
–Symphony No. 1 in D, op. 25 "Classical Symphony" by Serge Prokofiev
–Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith
–Le Boeuf sur le Toit, op. 58 by Darius Milhaud
Enough! Or Too Much!
There are rainstorms, and then there are hurricanes.
There are symphonies, and then there is Gustav Mahler.
The Austrian composer is like nothing else in classical music, and his unique brand of emotional fury inspires a cultish following. You may love Mozart or Chopin, but if you're a Mahler fan, you are in love. Devoted. An acolyte; it's akin to religious conversion.
"I love all composers," said the late music critic Dimitri Drobatschewsky, "but the composer for whom I will make the greatest effort, or spend the most money, is Mahler. There is nothing in life that can replace what Mahler's music does to and for me."
It is almost an addiction.
The music hits closer to the experience of being alive than almost any other: deeper, more emotional, more direct. The Mahler addict measures a performance not so much by whether he leaves the hall whistling the tunes, as whether he has lost control of his lacrimal glands and has to hide his face as he leaves, so as not to show himself weeping in public. Mahler's music is personal; it batters your heart.
He asks you the questions you think about only at the most extreme moments of your life: Why are we here? What is death? Love? How has the child become the man? It isn't the intellectual answers he seeks, but the emotional landscape of the questions themselves.
There is nothing moderate in music or performance. Leonard Bernstein, often credited with starting the modern Mahler revival, was a particularly passionate exponent of the music.
"People are always saying that I exaggerate Mahler, which is so stupid," he said, "because you cannot exaggerate Mahler enough! To play a Mahler symphony, you have to give it your whole heart and body and soul and everything."
As William Blake said, "Enough or Too Much! Less than all cannot satisfy."
'3 times an outsider'
Gustav Mahler was born in 1860, one year before the American Civil War began, to a Jewish family in what now is the Czech Republic. He rose to prominence as a conductor in Vienna, where he was alternately lionized and vilified. By all accounts, he was one of the greatest conductors of his time, but a vicious element of anti-Semitism conspired against him, despite his careerist conversion to Roman Catholicism.
"I am three times an outsider," he famously said, "as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world."
He finished his first symphony in 1889, and he put into it much of his life up to that time. Every Mahler symphony is in some way autobiographical. It's not just abstract music; the symphonies are his life.
Even in the First, the opening section depicts recollections of his childhood, of taking walks in the woods in Moravia with his father. So those high harmonics in the violins depict the wind blowing through the pine needles, and the clarinet depicts cuckoo calls, and then an offstage trumpet plays a fanfare because, in the woods they used to walk, there was a distant army barracks.
Mahler himself said, "A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything."
It must be made the musical version of D.H. Lawrence's "bright book of life."
A challenge
Mahler presents an initial challenge to the newcomer, who is used to attending a concert for the purpose of hearing the great abstract artform left to us by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky, Copland, Prokofiev. But nothing in Mahler is merely abstract: It is all personal. All life. All extreme. The composer asks his audience not to enjoy his melodies, but to use the music to search their own lives for the return of serve he rockets into your court.
The Fourth Symphony is the best entry point for the neophyte: Mahler's shortest symphony, filled with all the things that make the composer so compelling. There are great tunes, inspired orchestration, a vocal part and many of the deeper themes that pervade all his symphonies: Nature, nostalgia, tragedy, death and innocence.
From there, you can move on to his more intense symphonies, where he feels compelled to throw at you everything he knows, everything he's ever felt.
For him, that meant adding to his already huge orchestra such things as sleigh bells (which open the Fourth Symphony), cowbells, mandolins and — in his tragic Sixth Symphony, hammer blows that "fell a man like an ax cutting a tree." The First Symphony has everything from klezmer bands to military marches.
He was trying to make a world, and that world is as much marching bands, elegant waltzes and earthy landlers as it is soaring, breathless melodies.
There is Mahler counterpoint, too: layers of tunes and snippets of tunes, less like the long line of a Bach fugue, and more like a Picasso collage, with torn fragments overlapped.
That mixture of high and low is both the hallmark of Mahler's world view and our own Postmodern world. Perhaps that is why Mahler feels so contemporary to us. For Mahler's contemporaries, his symphonies too often seemed to be infected by the worst sort of vulgarity. They had come to hear hochste deutsche Kunst — high German art — and got tin whistles and banjos thrown in in the bargain.
The "unmedicated" Mahler
If Mahler is about anything, it is about these extremes: sublimity and camp, aspiration and despair, irony and sentimentality.
In his famous essay about the composer, Bernstein wrote: "Think of it, Mahler the creator vs. Mahler the performer; the Jew vs. the Christian; the believer vs. the doubter; the naif vs. the sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs. the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian philosopher vs. the Oriental mystic; the operatic symphonist who never wrote an opera."
Mahler can whip you around these opposites, turning his music on a dime, snapping your emotions back and forth like a pennant in a Wrigley Field bluster. Not only between movements, but he can be ecstatic for three bars, and, suddenly, you're in the deepest depression for six, only to snap to attention with 12 bars so alert that they seem electrified.
If he were alive today, he'd probably be on medication.
The slow movement of the Fourth Symphony is that way: It is a theme and variations on two themes, one elevated and serene, the other devilish and taunting. The two themes merge in variations, finally both stopping as the orchestra bellows a loud cry — for some, it is the gates of heaven opening. Time, and the music's forward motion, stop dead in glory.
All that is followed in the finale by a song sung by a soprano, directed to sing in a childlike, innocent way, about the wonders of that heaven, imagined by a child, where "the angels bake the bread." From the sublime to the ridiculous in one easy step.
Exhausting pinnacle of art
You can leave a concert humming Mozart's tunes or inspired by Beethoven's nobility, but after Mahler, you are simply spent. You've been "rode hard and put up wet." He has dragged you from pillar to emotional post, pounded your deepest fears, pointed with your most fervent hopes. Mahler exhausts.
For those who are up to it, it is the pinnacle of art. For those who ask for something less exaggerated from their music, Mahler can be interminable and exasperating.
The symphonies are long — some single movements are longer than whole Beethoven symphonies. Mahler is an acquired taste.
Yet, while they are sonically splendorous, they are spiritually deep, and if music is an expression of the human spirit, Mahler is exploring its deepest depths.
For Drobatschewsky, it is summed up in the Mahler Ninth that he heard conducted by Claudio Abbado in Amsterdam.
"I am not a religious man, but what other people get out of religion, I get out of Mahler: solace, joy, every feeling that's known to man.
"All out of Mahler's music."
NAG NAG NAG: An ADDENDUM
Gustav Mahler was a control freak.
Look at most music scores and you see not only notes but some basic instruction: tempo markings, how loud to play, whether to speed up or not.
Look at a Mahler symphony score and you see enough writing to fill a book. He was a micromanager.
The Dover miniature score for his Fifth Symphony, for instance, has four pages of small-print glossary to translate Mahler's German instructions. Hardly a bar goes by without some nudge by the composer.
In the first four bars alone of Mahler's Fourth Symphony, he asks the orchestra to play "Moderately, not rushed," and with "Grace notes very short," "staccato" and "piano" ("quietly"), followed by "sempre piano" ("always quiet"), followed immediately by a diminuendo ("get quieter) — which would seem to contradict the sempre piano by asking the orchestra to change. Meanwhile, he asks that the music be played "grazioso" (gracefully), while also asking for a "poco ritardando" ("slow down a little").
That's in three bars. In the fourth, he asks for a return to the original tempo, but it should also now be "comfortable." Meanwhile, he throws in a reminder: "Expressively."
That's only four bars out of an hourlong symphony.
You have to give yourself over to Mahler's intentions, perhaps more than for any other composer, due to the sheer volume of specific instructions he has left us.
The markings can be difficult to interpret, however. The very first instruction Mahler gives for his "Songs of a Wayfarer," before he says anything else, is "Faster." Faster than what? That is followed by "Slower" and, two bars later, "Faster," and back and forth until he gets to "Smoothly agitated."
Most conductors mark up their scores with little notes to themselves to remember this or that detail in the music. Mahler was a conductor, too, and has given the performer the benefit of his own marking up.
Basically, Mahler was a backseat driver.
Mahler and meaning
I am at this moment listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony and my face is covered with my own tears and my insides are torn up by the force of the music.
It is the morendo of the final movement. Ersterbend, is what Mahler asks for. And he means "dying." Not the dramatic or theatrical dying a sensitive teenager imagines, but a slow extinguishing ad nihil: a kind of evaporation of the last molecules of life. I can hardly tell when the last note actually ends, it is so quiet.
The great music critic, Dimitri Drobatschewsky, who died last year at 90, (and who attended the Ring cycle at Bayreuth 17 times, and before he retired, managed to go to two different Mahler festivals, one in Amsterdam in 1995 and the other in Berlin 10 years later) said the highest experience he ever had in a concert hall was the Mahler Ninth conducted by Abbado in Amsterdam. As that last note hung in the ether and finally could be heard only in the mind's ear, Dimitri said he was afraid the mood would be destroyed by the expected applause, but it didn't: "No one applauded for a full five minutes," he said. And I've read the same thing in other accounts of that concert. If he was exaggerating, it is only by a little.
Applause would have been the inappropriate response to the music; this was hardly a case of hearing pleasant tunes and enjoying them. The music, rather, spoke to its listeners on some deep, disturbing and emotional level.
The profound emotions drawn out of us by Mahler, or the late Beethoven quartets, or the Bach unaccompanieds (take your pick, fiddle or violoncello), have long ago persuaded me that music is not abstract, as the current prejudice would have it, but rather, it was meant by its composer to be "about something." That is, the music is deeply metaphorical.
When we listen to Shostakovich's Seventh or his Eighth quartet, or to Beethoven's Eroica or Mahler's Third, we are hearing the composers thoughts about extra-musical issues. Yes, they are all elaborate, complex and interesting arrangements of notes, but they are also about war, heroism, nobility, longing, death, love and idealism, among many other things. To ignore those things in the music is to misunderstand the music. Worse, it is to trivialize it.
I am not making the argument that all music, or all classical music is meant to be understood philosophically, but that a certain level of music by a certain class of composer was intended to intersect the larger issues of being alive. A brilliant Mozart divertimento may not be more than an especially graceful and intelligent divertissement, and our main concern may be the clever things he does with D-major, but you cannot hear "Viva la libertad" from Don Giovanni and not weep for its extra-musical import and what it meant at that instant of human history.
Neither am I making an argument for what used to be called "program music." I don't mean that the composer meant to tell a story simply by substituting notes for words. Yes, many 19th century composers published or announced "programs" for their works, but many of them also privately or later publicly disavowed those programs. And there are many cases of music writers proposing programs that are prima facie ridiculous. We now use those excesses to bludgeon the entire century of musical purpose.
But I am saying that the music we take most seriously, and hold to the longest in our lives, speaks to us of more than musical ingredients. We should not be embarrassed to be brought to tears or to elation by the Beethoven Ninth or the Verdi Requiem. That's what those composers intended to happen. They weren't entertaining us, they were speaking to us.
There are two aspects to this problem that I worry the most about.
The first is the assertion by some (including all those tedious French Post-Structuralists) that thoughts and words are identical. There is a good deal of thinking — perhaps the overwhelming majority — that is not verbal. We can think spatially, we can think mathematically, we can think emotionally, we can think visually. When we do something as simple as pass a car while driving, we don't think in words about the speed of our car, the speed of the car in front of us, the speed of the car coming at us in the other lane and how far off it is. We think in temporal-spatial terms, completely without words, knowing whether there is opportunity to overtake the bumpkin in the pickup truck in front of us who is going 25 in a 45 mph zone. No words, but thought nonetheless.
And when Richard Strauss takes on the afflatus of idealistic aspiration in his Don Juan, we recognize the affliction in our own body-reaction — the heightened pulse or the rise of gorge in our goozle. I don't have to put in words to know it. It is the perfect musical metaphor for the non-musical experience.
If one objects that the music can never be as precise, or that it is always ambiguous, I can only respond that words themselves are always ambiguous and imprecise. Their supposed precision is an optical illusion. (It is why we have lawyers). To contain largeness requires ambiguity: The more precise a word is, the less it defines, until the ultimate precise word has no more meaning than the name of a dog. Here, Spot.
(I mean, for instance, that genus is more narrow than phylum, species more precise than genus, breed yet more precise than species, and when you slice it down to an individual dog by name, you have narrowed the scope so much that whatever observation you make no longer has any wide application.)
If we think about this issue of precision, it is obvious: What is the white whale in Moby Dick? The very ambiguity is essential to its power. So, this can be no argument against metaphor in music.
And secondly, if you say music is not "universal" and is culturally inflected — as so many intellectuals do these days — then I scratch my head. Is not language culturally inflected? Do you not have to learn English to understand Steinbeck? So how is it different having to learn the tradition of European classical music to understand Mahler? Mahler is (albeit idiosyncratic) something to learn, just as you have to learn by reading Faulkner or Joyce to get past the parts that at first don't make sense.
The Mahler Third arguably makes no sense understood merely musically. It took me years to begin to fathom what was going on in that vast ocean of music and orchestration, but now that I understand it metaphorically, it is the greatest of Mahler's symphonies (or maybe shares that with the Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde — "Ewig, Ewig."
The other big problem I have is the prejudice of Modernism.
I have lived through the century of Modernism, and was infected with it from my earliest years. I am only recently cured. I grew up loving abstract art and stream-of-consciousness novels. The party trick that is Modernism is to understand the means of expression as the subject of the art itself: color, form, shape, contrast: These carry meaning in themselves.
(I know Modernism has other aims as well, but this part of it is what ruins classical music for me.)
And you can see the effect of Modernism in the history of classical music recordings. The old style of performance, exemplified by Furtwangler, Mengelberg, Casals and Walter, by mid-century, gives way to Toscanini, Weingartner and eventually Szell, Solti and now, John Eliot Gardner. These are the "just-the-facts-ma'am" conductors, following Toscanini's dictum: "To some, the Eroica may be about heroism and nobility, but to me it is just Allegro con brio."
A century of musicians have disparaged the very idea that music can be about anything but music. "Music can express nothing," said Stravinsky, whose music is profoundly expressive despite himself.
What is lost when this Modernist esthetic is applied to music — and 19th century music in particular — is the core of what the music is about. If a Leonard Slatkin doesn't believe that the first movement of the Eroica strives for something and achieves it in the coda, then he is only making noise. I read reviews over and over where the critic complains that the conductor is "interpreting" the music instead of just letting it speak for itself, and what he means, of course, is that he wants the music to shut up about life, death, the universe and everything, and just scratch the familiar tickles and amuse me. As if you could play Hamlet and just speak the words clearly without all that "acting."
The century of Modernism is over, although the effects linger on. And what we call Postmodernism isn't all that much better (it being merely a kind of Mannerism to the Renaissance of Modernism), but you can find a number of musicians and conductors seeking to find other ways of dealing with the real issues of the music. Yes, there are the Roger Norringtons out there, mucking things up with their idiocy, but there are also the Mikhail Pletnevs and Daniel Barenboims, seeking to understand why there should be a ritardando here, or a sforzato there, even when not called for in the score. The same as a Gielgud applies a pause in "To be or not to be," to maximize the rhetorical understanding of the content. Shakespeare did not indicate such in his text, but an intelligent actor knows where they work and why.
I also have to laugh at the way Modernism once thought of itself as the natural conclusion of a historical process, having finally gotten to the point of esthetic "purity" that all art previously only aspired to. Got a giggle out of that.
Along with Pablo Neruda, I am in favor of the impure in art.
And in favor, not of a simple-minded return to an elusive "golden age" of the past — such an age never existed, and the old recordings prove that musicians now play in better tune and with better intonation than they ever played for Mengelberg — but for some new way to explore the metaphor inherent in the music, and not to ignore the music's meaning for the sake of keeping alive a dying flame of Modernism.
You and me should stop saying "him and I"
Americans have always had a cultural inferiority complex. In other areas, we may walk with a swagger of a bully, but from our earliest years, when the colonists imported all their music and tea, to the 20th century, when we looked to France for our avant garde, Americans have not had the self-confidence to be who they are.
And so, we often try our hardest to climb the social ladder by imitating others.
Certainly this impulse is behind the current epidemic of saying "you and I" when we mean "you and me." As in, "He left a message for Harry and I." The hair twitches on the back of my neck every time I hear it.
I know where this ugly solecism comes from: We have been told not to say, "Me and Harry are going down to the shop to work on the carburetor," but rather, "Harry and I are going."
"It's a question of breeding," our matronly third-grade teachers told us, lorgnette over nose.
Henry Thoreau noticed that when a cat jumps on a hot stove and is burned, it will never jump on a hot stove again. But then, it will never jump on a cold one, either.
And we transfer this delicacy to the wrong place, saying "you and I" whether as subject or object.
It's like holding up our pinkie when we pick up our teacup.
In the process, we often make ourselves look foolish, as we attempt to be more French than the French or more English than the queen. Only this attempt to borrow class can explain the success of such monumental bores as Masterpiece Theatre.
But America ain't Cole Porter; America is Leo Gorcey.
This has been brought back to me hearing local TV news anchors attempt to stuff self-consciously correct Spanish pronunciations into the middle of middle-brow English sentences.
"In the latest news from 'Nee-hah-RAH-wah' . . .," the anchor will say, and I am embarrassed for him. Not because he's trying to be politically correct, but because he doesn't seem to know that "Nicaragua" is an English word. Sure, it is spelled just like the Spanish word, but like so many formerly foreign words, it has become naturalized.
The American pronunciation falls off the tongue better, certainly, than the British pronunciation: Nick-uh-RAG-yoo-wa.
"But we need to show respect for Hispanic culture," he says.
And I agree. Americans are miserable when it comes to learning second languages. I am all for a bilingual America; we should not be so provincial as we are. But my simple answer is a question:
Are we showing disrespect for the French when we blithely mispronounce "Paris"? Why should it not be "Par-ee?"
Well, because it sounds pretentious, that's why. Pronunciation is guided by usage. We say "Paris" in English and "Par-ee" when we speak French.
Which is why the same news anchor isn't consistent and doesn't bring us news from "Meh-hee-ko," our neighbor to the south. It would sound silly. Long usage in English makes us pronounce the "X" in Mexico as a "ks" sound, its habitual sound in English.
Are we dissing Russia when we say "Moscow" instead of "Moosk-vah?" And after all, what do the Chinese call their country? Certainly it isn't "China."
Are you suggesting we should say "Nihon" instead of "Japan"?
This isn't really about respect but about communication: Usage allows our hearer to understand our words.
And conversely, is the Puerto Rican immigrant showing disrespect for American when he calls our largest city "Noo Jork?" Of course not, but certainly respect has to be a two-way street. Those who demand we show respect for other cultures often share the familiar lack of "cultural self-esteem" for their American roots.
If it is a moral question to give up our American pronunciation of familiar foreign words, why is it not also a moral question for others to give up their accents when they speak English?
Put that way, the silliness of it all becomes clear.
English is a wonderfully rich and adaptable language, and it has borrowed from almost every other language on the planet over the years. But it changes the words it borrows and makes them fit comfortably on the English-speaking tongue.
Certain words and names through long usage have developed idiomatic English pronunciations. We listen to the mazurkas of "Show-pan" and look at the canvases of "Van-go." It puts people off — and certainly puts me off — when people attempt to be more correct than necessary. In essence, they are merely showing off.
It is that unattractive element of social climbing.
When there is not a habitual English idiomatic usage, I'm all for pronouncing words as accurately as possible in their original language. But some things have become English.
I remember an object lesson listening to classical music radio in North Carolina many years ago.
The station was traditionally run by engineering students who were more interested in radio than in music. They couldn't pronounce anything right. They mangled composers' names. Bach was "Baytch," Chopin was a phonetical "Chop-in," as in "there's a pork chop in the freezer."
We suffered for years, until they went the exact opposite way. One day they got an announcer who was more French than De Gaulle, or thought he was.
All of a sudden, Chopin's name was "Fray-der-EEK France-WAH Show-(something swallowed in the back of the throat and simultaneously sneezed out the nose after wrapping around the adenoids)."
It was a pretentious-sounding rectitude.
That same announcer later gave away the game, demonstrating what level of sophistication he'd actually achieved, when he played a Mahler symphony and he called out the name "Goose-TAHV Mah-LAY."


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Home > KarenAndrews > Media Releases > Young Australians value STEM for the future
Young Australians value STEM for the future
Young Australians are keen on pursuing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and careers, and these skills are seen as important to get a good job, according to a new national survey.
These were among the key findings of a survey of 2000 people aged between 12 to 25 and their attitudes to STEM.
Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said most of the findings are encouraging, but the survey shows there's more to be done to inspire girls and young women to embrace STEM study and through to their careers.
"Today marks International Women's Day - an ideal opportunity to pause and assess where we stand in our efforts to increase female representation in these vital fields," Minister Andrews said.
"As an engineer myself, it's very encouraging the study found our youth think scientists make a positive difference to the world, and young women want to use STEM to make a difference.
"Females – more than males – are driven to study STEM subjects by an ambition to change the world, but interest and confidence in these subjects is strongly divided along gender lines."
From early in their education, the survey found that boys were significantly more likely to choose STEM electives. For Years 9 and 10, 70 per cent of boys chose to study at least one STEM elective, compared to 32 per cent of girls.
There were also marked gender differences in the intentions of students in Years 11 and 12 to study these subjects in higher education, particularly for engineering and technology courses, and computing and information technology courses.
"The Liberal National Government is determined to increase the participation of girls and women in STEM fields," Minister Andrews said.
"Our range of initiatives include the appointment of award-winning astrophysicist Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith as Australia's first Women in STEM Ambassador with a key goal to raise the profile of girls and women in STEM in order to increase participation.
"In addition, the Girls in STEM Toolkit would help girls in upper primary and secondary school to understand the value of the subjects and careers open to them and provide pathways to achieve their goals."
In the 2018-19 Budget, the Liberal National Government committed $4.5 million over four years to support long-term strategic approaches to encourage more women to pursue STEM education and careers.
This builds on existing programs, including the National Innovation and Science Agenda's Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship initiative, which invested more than $13 million from 2016-2017 to 2019-2020 towards increasing female participation in STEM subjects and entrepreneurial careers.
The Liberal National Government recognises the importance of science and technology as key drivers of Australia's economy, and the jobs of the future more generally and is part of our plan to create a further 1.25 million jobs over the next five years.
To read the Student Edge survey visit www.industry.gov.au/data-and-publications/youth-in-stem-research
Media contact: Minister Andrews' office 02 6277 7070

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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