5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music

In which the New York Times asks several artists to provide an entry into classical for non-classical listeners. An idea which I’m sure has been done to death, but which is kind of irresistible anyway. And which in fact syncs up nicely with my own recent mission to finally explore the stuff. My exploration is two-fold—and I’m not sure how possible it will be to attain the second without the first:

1) Will I ever simply understand and be able to follow classical composition? (I have a brain, I assume I’m capable, but will I maintain my interest long enough to do so?)
2) Will I in fact arrive at a place (a state of mind) where listening to classical is no longer just work but is in fact deeply pleasurable?

I arrived at that aforementioned place with jazz a decade ago (though a great deal of it, including some of the stuff I love, still confuses the hell out of me), and this was after two previous decades of effort. Ditto Captain Beefheart. So I assume this is possible with classical, too. However, jazz and rock—or anyway, the jazz I ended up gravitating towards and the rock that’s always been there—do not seem nearly as distant from one another as classical and rock. Yes, there are exceptions to this, but the trajectory seems to me to be one-way: all sorts of pop and rock “incorporate”—yuck—classical, but so what? Pop and rock subsume (take on? eat up?) everything, ultimately. But where is the rock or the pop in classical? Can I hear pop flowing in the other direction? Is there pop music in the DNA of, say, Bach?

I’m not a total novice. I have some classical favourites, though most of them are 20th century, and mostly the sort of thing that upends a listener’s ideas of “classical” (is it even referred to as classical?). Again, it tends to be stuff with an obvious link to pop (start with some of the minimalists and work your way out from there).

Next month I’m attending, with a friend who has become my guide to the stuff, my very first symphony, a performance of Mahler’s 5th. Twenty-five years ago, I saw my first opera and I think I lasted 15 minutes before squirming wildly in my seat for the next 12 hours. Sub-titles didn’t help. I don’t recall which opera it was.

“For twenty years now, I’ve been telling the trainees who I teach and mentor that they should recognize that they will never develop such intense personal relationships as the ones they are now cultivating with their peers in the trenches during medical training. And for years this has held true for me. Until Expert Witness happened.

“Expert Witness is just as vivid and important a shared experience for me as my residency was. I’ve made friends I’ll hunt down in my travels. I’ll share my tough moments. I’ll always have my eye out for someone wearing a Wussy t-shirt. And I’ll always be there when any Witness gives me a call.

“There is something epic about how Mr. Christgau has crafted his writing, his art history of the musical now. But in some weird way his writing expands into something even more alive here at Expert Witness.”

– Cam Patterson salutes the Expert Witness community, which, interestingly, has felt like as big a part of the Exert Witness story in the last few days as the demise of Christgau’s column itself.

It’s a wonderful thing to be part of a community — a genuine community, I mean (not to get all hoity-toity pedantic on you, but like “friend,” the word has been somewhat debased — or anyway, altered beyond meaningfulness — in the Web 2.0 era). Not just one connected by geography or demographics or economics but a community brought together through what Patterson calls “shared experiences.” I’ve experienced that kind of community three times in my entire life: writing for Nerve, a Toronto indie publication, in the mid-80s; writing for Why Music Sucks and Radio On (and Tapeworm and Kitschener) during the ’90s — a fanzine network with a core group of writers who contributed to the discussion in all of them; and the HMV Superstore in Toronto, also during the ’90s, where I was employed, in various positions, for nearly a decade. The strength of these respective communities was far from equivalent, and all ended, to some degree, in varying measures of disappointment. But the fact is, they existed, and for however long, and to whatever degree, I was part of something bigger than myself.

I’ve certainly experienced intimations of community at other times and in other places (and even in other jobs, such as my current one), but those three events, or situations, feel singular to me, and I’m not convinced I’ll ever experience something like them again. I think I’m just too ambivalent about community now (whereas, I’m much less ambivalent now about family, which, by the way, I don’t interchange with “community,” though there are shared characteristics, for sure). It’s sad in a way that communities never last, at least in a physical, or real-time, sense. But the truth is, if you’ve experienced community it will never really leave you anymore than you will ever leave it. (Believe it or not, I actually appreciate Facebook for this reason; it has been my only means of staying in touch with my HMV cronies.) I laughed at Patterson’s line, “I’ll always have my eye out for someone wearing a Wussy t-shirt,” but my laugh, ultimately, is one of recognition, not scorn (not that you will ever catch me in such a tee).

You know, I don’t care that most rock critics hate the Doors — I became a fan of their music at the age of seven or eight, and the greatest of their music has continued to sound good to me ever since (in the eighties, just as I was discovering and being persuaded by rock criticism, I adapted a kneejerk reaction towards them for a few years, but I got over it). But I guess I do care enough to make two brief points here, both inspired, of course, by Ray Manzarek’s death (for a few hours, my Facebook feed was aggravating; so many people making a point of explaining that they “didn’t care much” for the Doors; thank God Jim Morrison had the smarts to die before Web 2.0, else I’d have tossed myself out the window along with my monitor).

1. The idea, espoused for years (at least as early back as Dave Marsh saying as much in a Rolling Stone Record Guide), that the group is “overrated” is of course a complete fallacy — the opposite of reality, really — unless the people who call them “overrated” mean that their fans like them too much, in which case every group with any kind of following is “overrated.” Because they’re sure not “overrated” by rock critics, the genre of species we normally rely on to “rate” things — under, over, whatever. Of the many critics whose work I’ve followed over the years, I can count on one hand those who have liked the music of the Doors, by which I don’t include critics who, in that polite, critical way, “admit” that the band “were not devoid of talent” (wow, careful that limb doesn’t break while you say as much). It’s possible that there was more love towards the band in the early days of rock criticism, but I don’t think so; they were pretty much mocked from the get-go, were they not? (Or maybe the disconnect here is that the band was written about much differently in the daily press accounts than in the stuff I have access to, the Creems and Rolling Stones of the world?)

2) On the subject of mockery, sometimes you have to remind people that a critic can mock something, deride it even, and still love it, or at least love parts of it. This is always how I read Meltzer and Bangs on the Doors. In one of his early reviews of them (I forget of which album), Meltzer calls the band (not even Morrison, but the band) “ridiculous” but means it, I’m pretty sure, in a way that is entirely complimentary. Bangs referred to Morrison as a bozo, but also was intensely moved by some of their music; in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, he suggests that “Light My Fire” paved the way for “Gimme Shelter” (an argument I think Greil Marcus picked up in his recent book on the band). One of the trends I find disconcerting in so much music criticism today is that writers seem unwilling to acknowledge the idea that ridiculousness and pretensiousness and buffoonery sometimes don’t prevent great music, and in fact, sometimes lead directly to great music. Pretensiousness can be aesthetically/philosophically worthy in and of itself. This point in some ways is not just related to the Doors — I know people who simply can’t stomach their pretensions enough to hear whatever might be good in it, and that’s fine. No one is required to hear the band the way I do. All I’m saying is…? Pretentiousness CAN be a virtue?

This funny Kids in the Hall clip re: Doors fandom is also notable for its ultra-snide reference to “America’s Only…”