For The Love of Beethoven

A defense of Classical music in the 21st Century, and a review of Richard Powers new novel “Orfeo”. 

It was maybe two or three years ago now that I was sitting in the now defunct Cutler’s Record Store in New Haven. The store had gone through an amoeba like state, changing every couple of months; lose some space here, but gain some there. They were a bit late on the vinyl revival of the past few years, but they were trying to play catch up. The selection had bloomed from one small display to two or three small displays. An improvement, but the floor was still dominated with CDs. You could browse the entire collection in a day, flipping through every piece. I swear I had some of the racks memorized; when something new did come in, I could tell.

Browsing the racks like I usually did, Kyle came up to me on this day and said “we got a couple nice new pieces in there.” Kyle was the kind of record store guy you wanted working at a record store. Always helpful and an ability to read what kind of music you might like as if he were one of these internet music programs. He had thick black framed glasses and a metal beard, and knew to let me know if they got any new punk records in. I thought I had him pegged down, but he surprised me when he finished the sentence, “yeah, we got a couple of Bartóks and…”

I was standing in front of the classical section, mind you. It was with the idea that I needed to broaden my horizons musically, or that rock and roll’s i-iv-v wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. I knew everything you needed to know about the Stones, but nothing about Sibelius. Sadly, I committed the solipsist’s sin when I assumed that no one else did either. So I sat there, and did what every person in a record store should do when they have a guy like Kyle there: “what do you recommend?”

We chatted for a bit about what he thought I might like based on other things I did like, and we decided that the Bartók was probably a good thing for me to grab. It was almost like confession when I revealed somewhere in the middle of the purchase that I really had no idea what to listen to when it came to classical. I had, at that point, been listening to the beginners guide to classical: Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. No small beans, but something to build on.

Kyle agreed that those three guys weren’t exactly a bad place to start and he told me a story. He recalled going to the library as a kid and going to the music selection and finding these records. He’d put on a record by Beethoven, put on headphones, and crank the volume up all the way. It was loud and it was an escape, just like any other record. Kyle branched out from there and ended up working at a record store. And that’s how he came to know all that he did.

Losing a Market

Cutler’s had, for a long time, two different record stores. There was the main store with the CDs and records and Pac-Man arcade game, but there was also Cutler’s Classical. They sat within the same store, separated only by an interior door, it was a place that I ignored every time I went downtown to buy a new record. By the time I worked down the street, the Classical store was closed and replaced by a skate shop that, too, went out.

All that was left was two rows of classical that I grabbed a Bartók or a Gershwin or a Verdi out of from time to time. Kyle was always there to help guide choices, seemingly knowing better than I did what I wanted to hear. But then Cutler’s went out of business after 70 years. The owners just weren’t making money in the music business anymore and focused on the t-shirt shop they had a few stores down.

Most record stores focus on what sells, the starter record collection that everyone wants Zeppelin IV and the White Album and Rumours. I’ve seen some places hide their classical on the ground, some in a back corner, and some don’t even have a spot for it. Either way, it’s always mistreated at these places. The best classical I’ve found has been at Goodwills and thrift shops. A former co-worker of mine gave me two boxes of records, mostly classical; a lot of Nonesuch, a lot of Angel, and a lot of Sviatoslav Richter.

While I bask in the glory of the .99 cent treasures, I find that classical, perhaps like jazz, is dying a slow death. And as the old euphemism goes, “it’s all over but the shouting.” Except the shouting is attracting attention.

Is Classical In Need of Saving?

Richard Powers, whose most recent novel, Orfeo, is about an avant-garde composer, might not see the situation as optimistically as I do. The story could be told as something like the Orpheus myth, saving classical music from beyond the river Styx, or in the case of the novel, the Mississippi. The realization then, is for Els, and maybe for Powers himself, Classical is dead and in need of saving.

In the novel we follow Peter Els, after he becomes wanted for bio-terrorism. Along the way, we learn of his life story through the lens of classical music: the natural talent as a child, falling in love with Mozart’s Jupiter, and falling in love with a girl who is just as in love with the romantic Classical. This girl breaks his heart and he dives deeper into music, studying with preeminent composers of the day (mostly fictional), but also taking cues from the very real and very strange iconoclast John Cage.

Much of Els life is struggle, his coming of age happens after the rise of rock and roll, and one particular early scene involves Els brother bullying him into liking it. Pop music, the Beatles, all have taken over the music scene, while in the background, the avant-garde is deconstructing the corpus and putting it back together with math and computers. After a public performance of a vocal piece Els wrote, his professor exclaimed “you have them all scratching their heads.” It would be “the most praise his mentor would ever give him.”

The Mouse and the Rabbit

While barely a compliment, the confusion Els causes with his performance is representative of classical in the 20th century: lost, confusing, a picking up of the pieces after the the early 20th century composers had their way it. It was an identity crisis coupled with a problem of awareness.

Early on in the novel, Els, still in love with that first girl is writing flowery music, loading up the bars with as many notes as he could. The same professor that was withholding of praise, was quick to dole out criticism. He denounced one of Els’ pieces as “decorative”, and questioned Mahler, a favorite of Els’. Yet, for many, it is decorative and flowery pieces that they so readily identify with classical.

Whether it be Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or Moonlight Sonata, people come to know classical through a very select few pieces. When enthusiasts talk about the greatness of Beethoven’s Fifth, and those first four notes famous the world round, they do not realize that for most, those are the only four notes most people know. Those who have shown some interest will move on to perhaps Brahms or Debussy, Chopin, and yet leave behind a world of music.

This is not without being exposed to classical. For some, it might even be on a daily basis. For myself, the seeds of appreciation were sown as a young child watching cartoons. Fantasia is an example that comes to mind. Scenes of Mickey Mouse as a sorcerer are so ingrained into the cultural fabric that I have a hard time believing that the general public isn’t aware of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Or how about the fight scene set to the Rite of Spring, or the frightening scene set to Night On Bald Mountain, full of ghouls and specters, and that demon. My favorite cartoon remains to this day What’s Opera, Doc?, the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon set to Wagner (although Rabbit of Seville is nothing to scoff at).

From a child on, exposure to classical is guaranteed. These cartoons are older than my parents, and they were still part of my childhood. Classical is part of the fabric of cinema as well. Whether you’re watching 2001 or The Social Network, it’s there. Or you could be hearing Shostakovitch in cell phone commercials. It seems like no matter what media you choose to view, you’re being exposed to classical at some point. So why doesn’t it hold on to our attentions past our TV screens?

For The Rich Only

Since exposure isn’t really a problem, it must certainly be the identity crisis that took its toll on classical in the 20th century. In addition to the experimental work going on mid-century that created a whole new sound, financial crisis and soaring ticket prices helped ensure a rift between the music and the public.

As Mark Vanhoenacker noted in Slate, classical music sales are declining. He too harps on the idea that classical is on deaths door, saying not just that “the fat lady hasn’t just sung. Brünnhilde has packed her bags and moved to Boca Raton.” He goes on to quote data that I will not reproduce here, but the outlook is grim when it comes to the spending power of the public, more specifically, the American public.

There is a crisis of Symphonies going bankrupt, and as Vanhoenacker notes, even the New York City Opera has succumbed to low ticket sales. Even famed establishments such as Tanglewood in Mass. has suffered from a decline in attendance over the past twenty years. And perhaps this has to do with the recession, people are spending less on practically everything, but this news is particularly harsh for classical.

The reason for this is that many consider classical to be an elitist’s enjoyment. It is something for the rich to listen to while they eat their soup with silver spoons. Take for instance the Metropolitan Opera. Tickets to see a show dip below $100 only for the most limited seats four or five floors above the stage. Most of the tickets are in the $100-$200 range, and some even cost as much as $400 a ticket. Even at the cheapest level, at $27 for a partial view family level seat, a family of four couldn’t pay less than $148 after ticket charges. For the same price, you can get nose bleed seats to a Yankees game, with 4 hot dogs and sodas.

This is true later on in Orfeo when Els’ Opera literally saves the company from bankruptcy but only because of a fortuitous happenstance. Earlier, Els attends a Musicircus with Maddy, his future wife, where he meets his lifelong collaborator Richard Bonner. This event, dreamed up by John Cage, organized musicians to come to an area and play, with very few rules as to what they should play. They still hold Musicircuses in Cage’s honor, but the very idea reminded me that some of the best classical performances are on college campuses across the nation.

I wrote earlier about a group of musicians called the Rite Now Project, who for the 100th anniversary of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, composed and performed a pastiche in honor of Stravinsky (they also performed the Rite). It was exciting and interesting, and it’s opening with bagpipes was altogether strange, but the best part was that it was free. And even then, if you can’t find a free event, seeing a student production of Cosi Fan Tutte is going to be much cheaper than going to see it at the Met.

Even if price weren’t an issue, I’m sure many would complain that the music itself were highfalutin. In discussing the matter with a friend, he wondered if a hard working blue collar individual, given the choice, would listen to Bach knowing he could listen to Bruce. He certainly has a point. But to that end, there’s just as much relaxation, perhaps even revelation, to be found in the Romantic pieces of Beethoven. It’s a common misnomer that it takes a refined ear to listen to classical music. As with all entertainment, there is surely an academic level to classical, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a level to be simply enjoyed.

Bach’s Mass in B Minor may not be for everyone, but one shouldn’t feel that they can’t listen to it because they don’t feel smart enough to listen to it. And no one is arguing that Einstein on the Beach is everyone’s cup of tea, but Metamorphosis is as simple as it is moving. For some, though, moving from rock and roll or even hip-hop shouldn’t be that difficult, as the influences are already there.

Music For The Masses

The masses may struggle with classical because they feel it isn’t for them, but many musicians, some of the best, feel that classical is for the masses. You can tell because they use it in their music, they quote it or use just a phrase, but the feeling is there. The narrator of Orfeo notes that the sixties were a time when “everyone was picking everyone else’s pockets: the Fab Four stealing from Stockhausen for Sgt. Pepper; Andriessen and Berio rearranging Lennon and McCartney.”

Brian Eno and David Bowie had a string of albums built around the influence of Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Dubbed the Berlin trilogy, much of the minimalist sound was taken from these two classical composers. The inspiration went noticed by Glass who later used Bowies albums Low and “Heroes” as inspirations for his own symphonies. Reich, for his part, further inspired James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem fame) when remixing a song off Bowie’s most recent album The Next Day. The sonic landscapes of Eno’s albums around the same time became keystones—if not the masterworks—in the genre of Ambient music. Meant to break the listener out of a mold, he wouldn’t feel so out of place in Els’ masters program where music is meant “to break all our ready-made habits.”

Even music that isn’t inspired directly by classical, can be talked about in terms associated with it. When Els is in a cabin, isolated from the world, he finds CDs mostly out of his time, and he goes through them: “They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine.” He puts on an album by Anthrax, and describes the song as “one long, joyous jackhammer assertion of tonic. […] for several notes Els thought the band, in a fit of real anarchy, had thrown Chopin’s E Minor Prelude—the “Vision”—into the cement mixer, like Lady Gaga quoting The Well Tempered Clavier.”

What might surprise Els though, is right smack in the middle, the band Wilco—unashamedly my favorite band—has used classical, and in many ways is inspired by it. Most notably on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the band tried to sample a work of Stravinsky’s for the song “Ashes of American Flags.” When they couldn’t secure them, they went and backmasked the song, put it through filters, and apparently used it anyway. More pointed though is how band-leader Jeff Tweedy tracks a record as if they were movements in a whole. Foreshadowing lyrics in the way that a melody might foreshadow a variation in a symphony, and guiding the listener on a journey from start to finish, Wilco on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot does what so many classical composers before them have done: create one large piece out of many smaller movements.

Wilco is surely not the only band to do this. Nine Inch Nails is another example of a band whose music follows a classical line just as much as they do rock and roll. Later Trent Reznor, bandleader of Nine Inch Nails, and Atticus Ross went on to record a sonic revisiting of Edvard Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King” for The Social Network, for which he received an Oscar for best original score. I have always thought of Kanye West as a John Cage-esque figure. The iconoclasm is there. The audacity is there. His love of Cage is apparent in many of his songs, and he sampled an Aphex Twin version of a Cage song, “Avril 14". I’m certainly not the only one who thinks so either. This blog post from the Houston Press notes many of the same similarities. Even this Carnegie Hall infographic likens Kanye’s affinity for experimental sounds to John Cage.

While this sample might be small, what it represents is some of the best music we have. I have noticed that, while not a blanket statement, much of today’s music has not earned it’s heft. Whereas Kanye’s work has gravitas, and Nine Inch Nails uses soft/loud dichotomy to effect, much of pop music goes for it — for lack of a better phrase. Mahler’s symphonies don’t force themselves upon you, but build to a catharsis, and the same goes for Wilco.

The Final Note

Orfeo ends with something of an epiphany when Els reveals that he was mutating genes in base-4, or really, composing music in DNA. This really speaks to Power’s pessimism towards classical music’s chances of survival, or, if the Orpheus myth is applicable, it’s retrieval from the grave. The implication is that there is so little left to compose that Els had to move to unheard music.

I don’t buy that. There will always be music left to write. Music even has the ability to be rewritten. Els’ opera The Fowler’s Snare, about a religious group holed up in a church, waiting on the end of the world came just as the Branch Davidians holed up in their church waiting on the end-times. While it was inspired by medieval events, in the scheme of the book, its temporality made it a huge success. In much the same way, it has been said that William Basinski was in Brooklyn, listening to old loops he had made, when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. Stills of homemade video Basinski had shot became the cover of the four releases that make up the Disintegration Loops. While the music had been recorded earlier, it took on a new meaning after the attacks.

The Disintegration Loops bring up a good question about classical music; what is it anyway? Is it classical? What is classical now? Some of Els students at the end of Orfeo are composing on their computers, can something that was never played by a living musician be considered classical? The 20th century made a lot of irreparable changes to the popular sound of the classical piece. But is that a bad thing?

It would be easy to say that that might not be such a bad thing. After all Brahms is leaps and bounds from Beethoven and he is leaps and bounds from Bach. Is it any surprise then that Basinski would be just as far from all of them?

The Difficult Decision

Part of the death of classical music is a metamorphosis. Just as there is no space in a contemporary world for Gregorian chants, there is no space for the Baroque, or even Neoclassical. How we choose to view classical is essentially a matter of personal opinion. Many choose to view Classical as a written tradition, but would that make Beck’s Song Reader part of that tradition? We could simply choose to view the music which most exudes, maybe not the qualities, but the feelings and emotions of classical. We can include that music as part of a canon, but who to include and who to leave out?

As we learn in Orfeo, some people lose the spark and some would rather die than live in a world without classical. It’s still an integral part of our culture, but it’s also inevitable that it will one day cease to be. One day it will be hard, even in this digital age, to find good recordings of great pieces. It already is—that’s why I go digging the crates for non-digitized versions. It is up to the audience to decide it’s value, but I insist that value is already implicit: from the time we are children it is impressed upon us from our cartoon heroes. And if something is good enough for Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, then it is certainly good enough for anybody, no matter how much money, education, or musical training you have. And certainly our pop heroes seem to think that there is something of worth in classical, their records advertise that fact with their blatant quoting, even sampling.

So, maybe classical is dying. And maybe it is all over but the shouting.

Must it be? Yes, es muß sein.