Midlife Meditation

Yes, it's come to this. I remember the exact moment I turned into a classical curmudgeon. The year was 1997, so I was 36. Young, you might think, for a curmudgeon, but bear with me. I had taken my second wife on a date to a concert of the Oregon Symphony. We sat down in our mid-priced seats on the main floor, beneath the balcony. I scanned the program notes, learning about the background of the soloist who would perform during the concerto, picked up a thing or two I hadn't known (despite spending most of my junior year at Willamette studying Beethoven) about the symphony that would conclude the concert, I allowed myself to relax into the familiar polychords of an orchestra warming up, applauded when the concert master walked onto the stage, felt my anticipation grow as the orchestra tuned, applauded as the conductor walked onto the stage, bowed, stepped onto the podium--all the rituals that put me in the right frame of mind to be at the receiving end of a performance...

Bad boy classical violinist Nigel Kennedy. The popularization of classical music has been going on for a very long time. I remember watching a Leonard Bernstein children's concert on PBS when I was in junior high. Bernstein was talking about Beethoven's sixth symphony, and trying to remove the associations his audience had with the imagery of Fantasia.  Since I had never seen Disney's early foray into producing animated images to accompany classical music, I had no idea what Bernstein was talking about--though his effort to make this lovely piece of pastoral music interesting to a young audience was well-intentioned, and I stayed tuned in to listen to the performance. Serious music has always had a hard time finding an audience. Music historians are fond of talking about how Mozart and Beethoven were the rock stars of their day, but they exaggerate the popularity of these great musicians. Mozart died in poverty, and Beethoven had to sell the same compositions to ...

(Click on the picture to see the article in Slate  that prompted this blog post.) "When will this ever end?" That's how I felt sitting through my first live classical performance. I was a freshman in high school, and my parents had obtained tickets to a recital by Van Cliburn, one of the greatest American pianists of the mid-twentieth century. I can't remember if either of them was there (it would've been a natural for my mother, herself a classically trained pianist who almost went to Julliard), or if any of my brothers was there with me (and please, bros, if you were and you remember, chime in in the comments); all I really remember is I wished I'd brought a book to read, though even at that age I knew it would've been considered rude. My fourteen-year-old musical skills (trumpet and piano) were unremarkable, and my exposure at that point in my life to classical music was limited to watching The Boston Pops  on PBS, and wishing they'd play le...

Yeah, I hear your dismay, fellow music nerds: What the glockenspiel happened to Brahms? The answer is very simple: I just don't care for him. Blasphemy! Heresy! Tools of musicological excommunication, anathematization, shunning, and belittling are even now being leveled at my cretinous self. But if you can just bear with me for a few minutes, I hope you'll reconsider booting me from the Society of Musical Snobbery, because the case I'm arguing in this series is that taste, while it can be cultivated, is ultimately subjective. When last (a few hours ago, to be precise) we checked in with our erstwhile musical novice, he was about to embark on full apprenticeship in the musical arts. His institution of choice: Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in Salem, Oregon. I arrived at Willamette grossly unlettered in music literature. My exposure to the classics was limited to a few recitals I had yawned my way through (Van Cliburn--yes, that Van Cliburn--was ...

   I am a snob. There. I admitted it. Happy? There's no getting around it: I go for the better things. I prefer the original Star Trek to the JJ Abrams remix, microbrews to BudMillCoors, Hondas to Fords, Steinways to Kimballs, iPhones to Galaxies, Dick's Kitchen to McDonalds, HBO to NBC... I could go on for several more paragraphs, but you've got the general idea. These are not just mild preferences. Some of them have been developing for decades. I'm not, in general, given to quick judgment, and lacking adequate knowledge and experience, I will not jump to conclusions about the relative superiority of one variety of a thing to all other iterations of that same thing. One bad experience does not necessarily eliminate an item from my favorites list, though it does result in a warning tag. My experience with Japanese cars, for instance, has been almost universally excellent, with one exception: an Acura that, in the three years I owned it, had two major breakd...