“To appreciate good music, one must be mentally alert and emotionally receptive,” said Rachmaninov. “Music is like poetry; it is a passion and a problem. You can’t enjoy and understand it merely by sitting still and letting it soak into your ears.”
Hence, one of history’s greatest pianists consistently refused to play for wireless broadcasts. He didn’t want his listeners to get too comfortable and complacent.
I wonder what Rachmaninov would say about today’s widespread practice of putting classical recordings on as background noise to dinnertime conversations. When this happens to Penelope and me, we ask, at the risk of being rude to our hosts, either to turn the music up, stop eating and talking, and just listen, or turn it off.
People who treat the highest achievement of man’s spirit with such cavalier disdain think they thereby display their high culture. In fact, they display symptoms of a disease fatal to culture, in its broadest possible sense.
In Rachmaninov’s time, vinyl records and wireless were the only media exposing people to music outside the concert hall. These days, we are so technologically advanced that we can have a steady hum of Bach and Beethoven buzzing in our ears all day long, at home, in restaurants, in the car – even in the MRI tube. Music is increasingly turning into Muzak.
Yet music transcends just nice sounds, which has been known at least since ancient Greece. There, it was a central part of the school curriculum, considered essential for both intellectual and moral development.
“Music is a moral law,” wrote Plato, “it gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and life to everything”.
Both he and Aristotle believed that music built character, creating harmony between the soul and the universe. Yet no such harmony can be achieved to the accompaniment of clanking silverware, glug-glugging of wine being poured, the guests paying compliments to the hostess and laughing at one another’s jokes.
It’s a truism that music is a tripartite collaboration involving the composer, the performer and the listener. But truisms achieve that status because they are true, as this one is.
The composer spends a lifetime looking for truth that hides among the sounds, waiting to be found and brought out. The performer preparing a piece for the concert platform spends hours every day for months trying to understand the composer’s truth and how best to divulge to the audience what it is (you understand I’m talking about serious musicians, not the Lang Langs of this world).
Yet all such efforts will be in vain if the listener doesn’t match them with his own. He too must spend a lifetime training his mind, soul and taste to open them up to the musical truth.
This requires quite a bit of learning and experience accumulated over many years. Above all, it takes tremendous concentration when listening: all quotidian problems forgotten, all extraneous thoughts expunged, all mental, emotional and aesthetic receptors attuned to their sharpest.
Anyone who thinks that modern life encourages such exertions must have been living with his eyes closed and his ears plugged. We live in a world that, to use the old advertising slogan, takes waiting out of wanting.
In this world, as I once wrote, “We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with soundbites, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.”
Real music has no place in this virtual world, which is why it has been largely ousted by pop rubbish or, even worse, perverted by it, bringing real music down to the level of pop.
People who attend concerts these days claim, truthfully, that they enjoy music. But without making the requisite effort, they are incapable of understanding it.
They perceive all those sonatas and symphonies the way they perceive pop excretions. Music to them is just pleasant sounds and familiar tunes, and an evening at a concert is mere entertainment not qualitatively different from a dinner out or a stadium outing.
This kind of demand creates its own supply. Mass-produced fleet-fingered ignoramuses happily provide the lighthearted entertainment sought; some even rap with the public between the pieces, adding aspects of stand-up comedy to their acrobatic acts.
Discrimination has become a swear word, with people forgetting its original meaning of discernment. That’s why today’s audiences reward every performance, no matter how inept, with thunderous applause, which becomes frenzied if the hack enjoys great publicity. Listeners who can actually judge a performance properly make up a negligible minority in any concert hall.
Would it be a great exaggeration to say that genuine believers also make up a negligible minority at any church service? For everything that holds true for perceiving music also applies tenfold to perceiving God.
Even as one’s senses must undergo a rigorous training programme over a lifetime for one to be able to grasp musical truth at a concert, so do one’s soul and mind require utmost concentration to grasp God’s truth in church. One can’t just sit back and listen to the liturgy any more than one can just sit back and listen to music.
A church service isn’t just a pleasant pre-lunch outing on a Sunday morning, nor is a concert just a pleasant pre-dinner outing on a Saturday night. If one doesn’t leave the church or the concert hall drained by the effort of intense concentration, one has missed the point.
It’s no accident that music and religion are so closely intertwined: they both signpost a path to the highest summit the human soul can ever scale. Yet any climb takes an exertion of mind and will, which isn’t something the modern lot can muster if no material payoff is beckoning.
Just as music and religion can guide a soul to a vertiginous height, so can their perversions dump the soul into a putrid swamp. Electronically enhanced pop din does that in music; shamanistic sectarian convulsions, in religion.
The audience does participate in both activities, but it does so gonadically and hysterically, not solemnly and spiritually. If Satan was the ape of God to Augustine, so is pop (I use the term collectively, without differentiating among its variants) a ghastly simulacrum of music.
Unlike real music requiring everlasting effort, pop delivers instant gratification, that overarching desideratum of modernity. It too forms character, just as Plato and Aristotle taught. Except that the character thus formed is facile, sensual without being sensitive, incapable of mental, spiritual and aesthetic subtlety.
It was Prof. Allan Bloom who, in his seminal 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, pointed out that pop music was more important to his students than real music had ever been in history. The youngsters identified themselves by the rock group that tickled their naughty bits most effectively.
That, wrote Bloom, filled young minds with the dross of a shallow, commercial culture of sex and rebellion. Bloom spoke of the “addiction to music” that he saw in the context of a broader decline in intellectual and moral development.
Plato and Aristotle would agree, and so would Rachmaninov.
P.S. Moving smoothly from the sublime to the gor blime, football commentators continue to teach me the meaning of English words. ‘Jeopardy’, I’ve learned, means ‘jealousy’.