I was wondering why I can appreciate film music more than the concert music.
I don't know music, is that the reason? Is it that my mandatory 10,000 hrs have not gone in? What is the reason?
I then remembered Chetan Bhagat Vs Classics. Some art is simplified for the masses. You start with simple, due your due diligence and evolve to complex. So, maybe someday I will understand classic/ concert music.
Meanwhile, read this funny but insightful article.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-dare/classical-music-concerts_b_1525896.html
But this was classical music. And there are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.
I don't think classical music was intended to be listened to in this way. And I don't think it honors the art form for us to maintain such a cadaverous body of rules.
To begin with, like many living composers, Beethoven was not universally understood or even particularly well liked -- nor did he care to be. Of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, critics who attended the 1805 premier wrote, "If Beethoven continues on this path, both he and the public will come off badly. Music could quickly come to such a point that everyone will leave the concert hall with only unpleasant feelings of exhaustion."
To his contemporaries, the sheer primal suspense in the Third was deliberately jacked up to such an unbearable degree that by measure 394 the first horn famously goes berserk, acting out the listener's agony of expectation by breaking in on the violins prematurely. So unprecedented and unruly was this bold psychological stroke that it was at first mistaken, even by the composer's close friends, for a sort of prank. His pupil Ferdinand Ries, thinking a blunder had been made, cried out, "Can't the damned horn player count?!" for which he came pretty close to receiving a sharp box on the ear.
Beethoven, it turns out, was not a follower of tradition. And no one was expected to keep quiet during his performances either. The music was much too wild, too complex, too dramatic and demanding. If it was gauche, the audience complained or praised at will just as they do today in non-classical concert experiences.
Nowadays, however, Beethoven it seems in spite of all his revolutionary fervor has along with the whole kit-and-caboodle of classical music become something of a rather dull commodity -- so perfect in every way that his music displays not really greatness or excitement anymore, but (I am sad to report) only "packaged greatness." Smugness, dullness, an over abundance of ritualism ... everything, in fact, that Beethoven hated.
One step therefore we might take to make classical music less boring again is simply for audiences to quit being so blasted reverential.
The most common practices in classical musical venues today represent a contrite response to a totalitarian belief system no one in America buys into anymore. To participate obediently is to act as a slave. It is counter to our culture.
The living composers I know though are real people. They bleed just like the rest of us -- or more accurately stated, because they are artists willing to put their thoughts into action for our review and criticism, they bleed publicly for us. They drink beers and feel tired and ride subways and dream about a better life. They are human and they want us to share a deeper, richer human experience together with them. They want, in effect, the same things Beethoven wanted.
Perhaps it's because of trying to keep classical music audiences living in the dark, in perpetual fear that they might not understand the secret and elite codes of long-term insiders, brainwashing core subscribers into an irrational hatred of anyone who dares to disrupt their peace-and-quiet even if accidentally, regimenting the experience with a coerced and inculcated rigidity that would be abhorrent to any composer worth his or her salt: This is how we have made classical music so awful.
Perhaps it's time to tell our own darling leaders to bug off and in place of their formalities simply allow ourselves to react to classical music with our hearts just as we do when we meet other forms of art. Classical music belongs to the audience -- to its listeners, not the critics, to the citizens, not the snobs.
Why not reclaim your music today?
I don't know music, is that the reason? Is it that my mandatory 10,000 hrs have not gone in? What is the reason?
I then remembered Chetan Bhagat Vs Classics. Some art is simplified for the masses. You start with simple, due your due diligence and evolve to complex. So, maybe someday I will understand classic/ concert music.
Meanwhile, read this funny but insightful article.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-dare/classical-music-concerts_b_1525896.html
But this was classical music. And there are a great many "clap here, not there" cloak-and-dagger protocols to abide by. I found myself a bit preoccupied -- as I believe are many classical concert goers -- by the imposing restrictions of ritual behavior on offer: all the shushing and silence and stony faced non-expression of the audience around me, presumably enraptured, certainly deferential, possibly catatonic; a thousand dead looking eyes, flickering silently in the darkness, as if a star field were about to be swallowed by a black hole.
I don't think classical music was intended to be listened to in this way. And I don't think it honors the art form for us to maintain such a cadaverous body of rules.
To begin with, like many living composers, Beethoven was not universally understood or even particularly well liked -- nor did he care to be. Of his Third Symphony, the Eroica, critics who attended the 1805 premier wrote, "If Beethoven continues on this path, both he and the public will come off badly. Music could quickly come to such a point that everyone will leave the concert hall with only unpleasant feelings of exhaustion."
To his contemporaries, the sheer primal suspense in the Third was deliberately jacked up to such an unbearable degree that by measure 394 the first horn famously goes berserk, acting out the listener's agony of expectation by breaking in on the violins prematurely. So unprecedented and unruly was this bold psychological stroke that it was at first mistaken, even by the composer's close friends, for a sort of prank. His pupil Ferdinand Ries, thinking a blunder had been made, cried out, "Can't the damned horn player count?!" for which he came pretty close to receiving a sharp box on the ear.
Beethoven, it turns out, was not a follower of tradition. And no one was expected to keep quiet during his performances either. The music was much too wild, too complex, too dramatic and demanding. If it was gauche, the audience complained or praised at will just as they do today in non-classical concert experiences.
Nowadays, however, Beethoven it seems in spite of all his revolutionary fervor has along with the whole kit-and-caboodle of classical music become something of a rather dull commodity -- so perfect in every way that his music displays not really greatness or excitement anymore, but (I am sad to report) only "packaged greatness." Smugness, dullness, an over abundance of ritualism ... everything, in fact, that Beethoven hated.
One step therefore we might take to make classical music less boring again is simply for audiences to quit being so blasted reverential.
The most common practices in classical musical venues today represent a contrite response to a totalitarian belief system no one in America buys into anymore. To participate obediently is to act as a slave. It is counter to our culture.
The living composers I know though are real people. They bleed just like the rest of us -- or more accurately stated, because they are artists willing to put their thoughts into action for our review and criticism, they bleed publicly for us. They drink beers and feel tired and ride subways and dream about a better life. They are human and they want us to share a deeper, richer human experience together with them. They want, in effect, the same things Beethoven wanted.
Perhaps it's because of trying to keep classical music audiences living in the dark, in perpetual fear that they might not understand the secret and elite codes of long-term insiders, brainwashing core subscribers into an irrational hatred of anyone who dares to disrupt their peace-and-quiet even if accidentally, regimenting the experience with a coerced and inculcated rigidity that would be abhorrent to any composer worth his or her salt: This is how we have made classical music so awful.
Perhaps it's time to tell our own darling leaders to bug off and in place of their formalities simply allow ourselves to react to classical music with our hearts just as we do when we meet other forms of art. Classical music belongs to the audience -- to its listeners, not the critics, to the citizens, not the snobs.
Why not reclaim your music today?
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