“He became the greatest composer of this or any other age.”
What pompous son-of-a-bitch wrote that?
Me. Which is surprising, since I don’t usually go in for statements like that.
Who am I to say? Who am I even to evaluate the experts who might say a thing like that? Isn’t it enough to say that, for me, Bach is like no other?
Oh, so you like the BeeGees? Or Daddy Yankee? Hey, they’re great too! It’s all good….
OK, I have spent a LOT of time at the cello, and in listening to classical music. In fact, I had to correct myself, just now, as I wrote the term “classical music.” My first instinct was to write “good music,” and I deleted the pejorative implication that some music is good and other music bad.
There’s a lot of political correctness in music, and in culture in general. But I’d like to argue, just now, for a little incorrectness.
Let me start by saying it’s hard for me to imagine music being “bad” in a moral sense, although about even that I can find an exception. Six months ago, I was jarred by hearing a rap song as it slowly came down the street, being blasted by a car stereo with horrible bass distortion. Worse, every single line in the song ended with the snarled word “mother fucker.” It seemed an incitement to riot.
OK, so what about the meaning of “good” as “of inferior quality?”
Not sure about that, either. Maybe there are standards in pop music or in rap that are just as exacting as in classical music. I’m quite sure there are in jazz, which, by the way, I just don’t like. But I don’t dismiss jazz, or label it less good.
What I would argue is that most, if not all, popular music is limited.
How so?
Most of our life is spent doing stupid stuff—shaving, driving to work, erasing the nonsense email that clutters our day. But there are moments when life jerks you down to the real world, which we define as unreal.
You go home one ordinary day, take a look at your wife, and see without needing to be told…you’re going to have your first child. She’s pregnant.
“It’s Alzheimer’s,” says the doctor.
Your boss calls a Friday, 4 PM meeting, you enter the room…and there’s a manila envelope with your name on it….
These are the moments when life stops—or begins—and nothing will be quite the same afterwards. The focus changes; you are now in a wide world. Time slows down. All of a sudden, you’re in transcendence, in wide time.
A time all of the mystics try to write about or describe, and can’t. Like pornography, you know it when you see it.
Or feel it.
So call it “wide time,” this time we all of us have had. It seems simple—life suddenly reduced to essentials—because time and experience have expanded and slowed. But it’s paradoxically an enormously complicated time.
And here’s where classical music excels. Because of its complexity—of form, of harmony, of rhythm—classical music mirrors states of being that pop music cannot.
Am I wrong?
Maybe. It’s just a hunch, an idea I play with. But my mood today, after a period of high stress and low energy, is frankly depleted. In fact, I am quite literally depleted, having gone through a nasty several days of diarrhea. And so today I turned to—who else?—Bach. And here it is—the et in terra pax section of the b minor Mass.
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