Classical music is beautiful. It makes sense to the ears.
20th century modern music, on the other hand, sort of makes me want to either fall asleep or run from the room in self-defense to keep the heinous pseudo-music from making my ears bleed. It's dissonant, rhythmless, and thorny. It makes me feel like I'm not smart or classy enough to understand and appreciate it; like I'm endlessly trying to "get it" but never even remotely close to succeeding.
Here's the trouble: It seems like whenever a conductor plans a concert, there's a nefarious plot to lure you in with promises of Mozart (yay!) or Beethoven (heck yes!), or Strauss and Liszt and Brahms (swoon!), all while secretly planning to pack the program chock full of weird bizarro random modern stuff while you're not looking.
It's as though they feel a compulsion to make you eat your vegetables (Charles Ives) and drink your codliver oil (Antonín Dvořák) before you can have dessert (Bach).
For Valentine's Day, I went to see Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. True to form, the first hour of the program was spent fighting off the unwanted advances of 20th century composers.
But then a strange thing happened: they played a Bartók piece and I didn't hate it. There were even moments that *gasp* I legitimately liked!
Naturally, the shock of it drove me toward reading up a little to figure out why this particular Bartók piece was so tolerably un-Bartók-ian. It turns out that there are a few good potential reasons for it.
1. European and American composers in the late 1930's to early 1940's were all trending away from modern and back toward populist music at the time. Maybe he was simply staying on-trend?
2. He had been ill for several years with polycythemia, a condition in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells and not enough of anything else. He likely knew this would be his last concerto before he died. Perhaps he wanted to leave the world with something that was a little gentler on the ears as his final legacy?
3. This reason is my favorite: He and his second wife, Ditta Pasztory Bartók (a concert pianist), had arrived penniless to New York just a few years earlier and they had no assets; no realistic means to support Ditta after Béla died. He wrote the 3rd concerto with her in mind, so that she could perform it to support herself after he was gone. It had to be something that
(A) she would like,
(B) she could play, and
(C) people would pay to hear.
Given the circumstances, I'm betting the last criterion may have been the most important of all. So he lightened up on the uncompromising dissonance and the prickly untrackable rhythms, and finally used his enormous musical talents to kindly write some melodies and harmonies for us.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It gets a little sticky at that point if you think about it, though, doesn't it?
The composer lives his whole life with pretty rigid artistic integrity, trying to champion a type of musical progress that he believes in, only to backslide toward something more traditional at the very end?
Does writing something un-Bartók-ian for a final chance at financial security make him a sellout? Or a savvy business man? A good husband? Or a traitor to his own artistic cause?
Someone who has studied a lot more music history and theory would be better-suited to answer that. All I know is that I didn't hate it.
20th century modern music, on the other hand, sort of makes me want to either fall asleep or run from the room in self-defense to keep the heinous pseudo-music from making my ears bleed. It's dissonant, rhythmless, and thorny. It makes me feel like I'm not smart or classy enough to understand and appreciate it; like I'm endlessly trying to "get it" but never even remotely close to succeeding.
 |
| Basically, this creepy piece of modern art looks how 20th century composers' music sounds. I don't understand it. Please make it go away. Crud, I just insulted art. Why am I so closed-minded? Maybe if I shut my eyes and plug my ears it will be gone when I open them? |
It's as though they feel a compulsion to make you eat your vegetables (Charles Ives) and drink your codliver oil (Antonín Dvořák) before you can have dessert (Bach).
For Valentine's Day, I went to see Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. True to form, the first hour of the program was spent fighting off the unwanted advances of 20th century composers.
But then a strange thing happened: they played a Bartók piece and I didn't hate it. There were even moments that *gasp* I legitimately liked!
Naturally, the shock of it drove me toward reading up a little to figure out why this particular Bartók piece was so tolerably un-Bartók-ian. It turns out that there are a few good potential reasons for it.
1. European and American composers in the late 1930's to early 1940's were all trending away from modern and back toward populist music at the time. Maybe he was simply staying on-trend?
2. He had been ill for several years with polycythemia, a condition in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells and not enough of anything else. He likely knew this would be his last concerto before he died. Perhaps he wanted to leave the world with something that was a little gentler on the ears as his final legacy?
3. This reason is my favorite: He and his second wife, Ditta Pasztory Bartók (a concert pianist), had arrived penniless to New York just a few years earlier and they had no assets; no realistic means to support Ditta after Béla died. He wrote the 3rd concerto with her in mind, so that she could perform it to support herself after he was gone. It had to be something that
(A) she would like,
(B) she could play, and
(C) people would pay to hear.
Given the circumstances, I'm betting the last criterion may have been the most important of all. So he lightened up on the uncompromising dissonance and the prickly untrackable rhythms, and finally used his enormous musical talents to kindly write some melodies and harmonies for us.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It gets a little sticky at that point if you think about it, though, doesn't it?
The composer lives his whole life with pretty rigid artistic integrity, trying to champion a type of musical progress that he believes in, only to backslide toward something more traditional at the very end?
Someone who has studied a lot more music history and theory would be better-suited to answer that. All I know is that I didn't hate it.
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