The Genius of the "Hummable Tune," Part 2

You'll remember when we last left our heroine, she was rattling on about a tad bit (okay, a lot) of snobbism/elitism/pseudo-intellectualism that had crept in and run rampant about the music-school hallways...and how disheartening it was. 

I mean, here we were sitting on several hundred years' worth of great stuff, musical feasts galore that could have kept us happily exploring, plumbing depths and nuances for the rest of our lives...only to be told, by those who were oh-so-much-further-evolved in this thing, that that was "irrelevant."

Our duty, it seemed, was instead to make up our own "brave new world" of music that required extensive liner notes and analysis to explain.

That challenged audiences.

That often puzzled, perplexed, and irritated  the hearers, rather than uplifting their spirits, offering them escapes or dreams, or providing them something as "simple" as enjoyment.

Not surprisingly,  audiences didn't like it...

...prompting  many of these oh-so-enlightened folks to declare that they were hopelessly "hidebound"...perhaps, even brainwashed!

At the very least...unsophisticated.

And the way out of that unsophisticated ignorance was...you guessed it...not to be found in "Standard Repertoire."

It was to be found in the brave-new-world stuff, in "challenge" and "expansion of horizons" and "relevance."

(There's that word again...)

Fortunately, some of us ignored them.

And, instead,  chose the adventure inherent in peeling back the layers of what was already on hand...and allowing ourselves to experience every crazy bit of it.

Because the best-kept secret of music school isn't about  "brave new worlds." 

It's that classical music--even "Standard Repertoire"--is a treasure trove of crazy.

Real, beautiful, inspiring, honest-to-God insanity.

That's the "secret handshake" we should be spreading to the crowd.

That's the "secret language" that, if we bother to teach, people learn to "speak" and "understand" so well that they pack the halls.

Listen to Gustavo Dudamel conduct Saint-Saens' Bacchanale. It's madness.

Watch Leonard Bernstein conduct Brahms' First Symphony, in performance, without a score. It's nuts.

And if you happen to be in the car while the "Great Gate of Kiev" section (the conclusion) of Pictures at an Exhibition is playing on your car stereo...you may have to pull over. I ought to know. I almost had to, one day, driving back from lunch for afternoon classes.

I was darn near still bouncing off the walls of the music building when I came in from the parking lot. And, as I was describing the way that music made me feel...one of my favorite professors started laughing. 

Not at me, but at the sheer fun of my reaction. 

Then, said something along the lines of, "Don't ever lose that."

Think about that for a second.

The Mussorgsky (especially in the Ravel orchestration) is "Standard Repertoire." 

The stuff that was being called "hidebound" and "irrelevant."

And yet my music prof, possessing a doctorate from a major highbrow school, didn't scold me not to get so excited about the stuff...

...but to, if at all possible, keep that ridiculously nutty enthusiasm as long as I could.

Because he knew what the "brave new world" advocates hadn't caught on to yet:

That "relevance" isn't what art is about. Never has been. Never will be.

So, what does this have to do with writing stories, you ask?

A fellow writer shared a quote recently that, paraphrased, is along the lines of "writing that is effortless to read takes a great deal of effort to produce."

The parallel in music? That "hummable" doesn't equal "unsophisticated."

It equals accessible. 

It equals simple, in music wrought from care. And effort. And love.

And, yes...more than a little craziness.

Done well, it takes people to a place outside themselves. 

Expands their worlds. 

Refreshes them.

Just the way a beautiful story can.

The "hummable" theme in classical music goes hand-in-hand with the "keeper" on your bookshelf. Both may look deceptively simple, when viewed from the outside.

Only when one plumbs a little deeper...or creates the "simple" thing from scratch...does one appreciate just what goes into either one.

These "keepers" (or "chestnuts," as the popular pieces of classical music are often called) are probably the clearest evidence of true communication with our audiences that we have--and the best proof that we, as artists, have done our jobs well. 

In music...and in stories.

And so, the accessible--and enjoyable--are what I aim for every time I sit down at the keyboard, take out my box of words, and attempt to combine them in alchemy that will make music of its own.

Simple.

Hummable.

Genius.

Thoughts?

Janny

 

The Genius of the "Hummable Tune," Part 1

There is such a thing as knowing too much.  

Now, if you know the CWC at all, you know there are things she infinitely prefers people do know about, especially when it comes to the written word.

She prefers people know the correct word for what they're expressing.

She prefers people know how to spell.

She prefers people know the difference between verb tenses, and which one is right for the moment.

She prefers people never, ever, ever, ever-ever make a plural with an apostrophe.

(Did I mention "ever"?)

But, I'll say it again: there is such a thing as knowing too much.

Or...maybe...just thinking we do.

And we're missing a splendid opportunity for real genius when that happens.

Let me illustrate.

Long ago, in music school, I was surrounded by a whole bunch of people who were all convinced classical music needed to be "refreshed."

And so they did unspeakable things to pianos and called the music for "prepared" instruments.

They made noises on electronic devices and called the music "multitonal."

They composed "music" like John Cage's "4'33"."

They brought in spoken word, and gesture, and slide shows, to "liven things up."

Why?

Because, in their estimation, "Standard Repertoire" (or "Western Music," or any other term you want to use for it) was filled with "timeworn, hackneyed 'chestnuts' written by a bunch of dead white men" that needed to be "thrown out" because "it wasn't meaningful anymore."

They were especially disdainful of music that people loved because "they could walk out of a concert hall humming it to themselves."

Why?

I didn't know then. And I still don't know now.

Let's face it: classical music is not necessarily the first music of choice for a general population. Many reasons abound for this, but at least one of them has to be that because, unless they find a comfortable way to get a good dose of it, they don't feel like they can "walk out of a concert hall humming [it] to themselves."

And that's a shame. Because there's some great stuff out there...

...if someone cares enough to bring it to them.

We see this happen all the time. 

Most of us learned our first classical music not from a venerable record collection in our parents' homes, but from background music for Looney Tunes.

Not to mention the use of Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ravel in 10, or Pachelbel in Ordinary People...among countless instances of the music in movies. 

What happened after that exposure? People went nuts for those pieces. 

So, can you imagine what would happen if they were exposed to even more of it?

Yeah. 

Only these people, with whom I was going to school, didn't see that possibility at all. 
To them, classical music audiences only loved Beethoven, and Bach, and Brahms, and Haydn, and Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Wagner, and Schubert, and Stravinsky, and Chopin, and Gounod, and Franck, and Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky, and dozens more pieces of music by those and other "dead white men" because "they didn't know any better." And that it was the job of those in the art to "enlighten" the audience.

(If this sounds suspiciously like both snobbism and elitism...you're catching on.)

Because an attitude like this has to have as its foundation the assumption that what you are throwing out, you're already thoroughly familiar with, and have found useless and/or boring. In other words, the attitude toward traditional classical music at that point becomes, "Seen it all, heard it all, next."

Only, speaking quite bluntly? For most of these people, especially for the college-age folks I encountered, that would have been completely impossible.

Haydn wrote over 100 symphonies.

Mozart wrote over 40.

Dvorak wrote 9, Beethoven wrote 9. And so on. And so on.

That's not even touching opera--or talking about Puccini, or Verdi, or Bizet.

Or oratorios (Handel, anybody?). Or cantatas, of which Bach alone wrote over 200.

Or march or waltz music (Strauss, Sousa, and a host of others).

Nor is it venturing onto the shores of polyphony and/or counterpoint of the likes of Vivaldi, or Palestrina, or deLassus, or Mouret, or Lully, or...

That's a whole lot of "notes" that, in terms of the general population--and even music students themselves--is stuff they've never heard before.

Stuff that, once heard, can change their lives forever.

And leave them wanting even more.

(I know. I was a music student with precious little background, and I drank the stuff up like a college kid at a kegger party.)

But all that was what these people wanted to dismiss, en masse, as being "irrelevant."

Because...people could hum it walking out of a concert hall?

Because...it was unsophisticated? 

Because...it wasn't profound, or deep, or meaningful?

Since bloody hell when?

(I defy anyone reading this to immerse yourself in Brahms' Fourth Symphony and not find sophistication, profundity, depth, and meaning in it--while you're humming it to yourself!--but, I digress.)

I'm here to tell you, as I wanted to tell them, that they'd not only missed the point of the art in the first place...but they'd missed the bus, the train, the ship, the plane, and the Concorde in the process. 

Because "relevance" isn't what makes music, or any art, wonderful...or valuable...

Nor has it ever been.

My dream is to write stories "people [can] walk out of a concert hall humming to themselves."

Why I put it that way, we'll talk about in Part 2!

Thoughts?

Janny