SCATTERED TOGETHERNESS
Classical music provides a sense of permanence, Michael Andor Brodeur writes.
A couple of weeks that already seem like a lifetime ago, Anthony Rudel, manager of the Boston-based classical station WCRB, had left the Boston Lyric Opera, where technicians had recorded the dress rehearsal of the company’s soon-to-be-cancelled production of Norma. He’d delighted upon hopping into his cab home to discover his driver, a young man, listening to Mozart.
Rudel asked the driver why he enjoyed listening to classical music on the job. “And he said, ‘Man, if you were driving around these streets all day, you’d need to relax, too.’”
“When I started in this business,” Rudel said, “the word ‘relax’ in classical? They wanted to kill you if you used those two things together. It was meant for intellectual stimulation! But you know what? In this day and age, we could use a little relaxation. That doesn’t diminish its value.”
This may account for the unprecedented moment classical music is experiencing right now, as it forges a new place for itself in culture, unlike any it’s occupied in the centuries we casually tuck into the term.
Locked out of the concert hall by global coronavirus concerns, endangered in physical and financial terms, classical music is fighting to survive and finding more paths than ever to its listeners.
Partly this is because we’re quite literally a captive audience.
But another part is the odd compatibility between classical music and digital media.
Spotify and other streamers let listeners wander though endless interpretations of classical works with ease, while Youtube and other video hubs allow us to follow along with visual scores. Zoom and its like enable impossible collaborations (with admittedly iffy sound), while Instagram and other livestreaming platforms are homes for countless performances exiled from the halls.
Yet the bigger part of it is that we somehow associate classical music with relaxation, and that’s in higher demand right now than hand sanitizer.
So what makes classical music “relaxing,” anyway?
Certainly there’s no rule that the music itself be a bubble bath. I have managed my own pandemic anxieties by clicking between the dark woods of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle (which ran nightly on the Met’s Live in HD site) and the blinding blasts of Krzysztof Penderecki (the Polish composer of the terrifying Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, who died March 29 at 86 after a long illness). And I don’t exactly feel fresh from the spa. I feel like I’ve had the full range of my longings and terrors reflected back at me. I feel understood.
So maybe “relaxing” is the wrong word. But there is certainly something soothing about recognizing the emotions we’re feeling now in music cast forth through hundreds of years. In times of crisis, we turn to this music for its wordless answers. This tendency has a lot less to do with what the music on the page presents than with what it represents: permanence.
Classical music offers listeners a sample of the impossible: a seamless overlap of past and present, a fleeting encounter between the ideal and the real.
And while no artifact is more ephemeral than a piece of music, the experience of music — when we allow its treatment of time to temporarily override time’s treatment of us — can give us surer footing in our least-stable moments.
Classical music gives us something beautiful to listen to, but it also gives us an experience of certainty, a structure we trust, a way things should go.
My social media feed has been a virtual mob of quarantined musicians reaching deep into the past for works to pass the long days at home, and light the way forward
The past few weeks online have shown this in action. Italian communities locked down by the novel coronavirus, quarantined on their balconies but clinging to the connection of earshot as they serenade each other.
We’ve seen virtual orchestras, such as the Cunningham Piano Online Ensemble, use Mozart to overcome the distance of nine countries and four generations. And we’ve seen ensembles scattered by isolation — from Norway to Spain to Canada to Australia and everywhere in between — assemble to perform, and to help the rest of us regroup.
Watching members of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy online from 19 separate apartments, or 49 members of the Colorado Symphony doing the same, or 20 members of the Toronto Symphony perform Copland’s Appalachian Spring, or 71 members of the New York Youth Symphony Orchestra sign on for a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Titan symphony resonates not only as a spectacle of technology or a salvo of resilience.
The scattered togetherness of these performances are reassurance that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — and even as our institutions shudder (and shutter) — some things last.
This assertion of permanence against unceasing change may also be the impulse behind so many music institutions engaging with their audiences by re-engaging their own archives. On a purely practical level, archives are easier to pull together than live stream, and require no gathering.
But on a more poetic level, archives represent a past we can return to — a souvenir of stability.
The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra just launched its Offstage platform, mixing at-home recitals from BSO musicians and archived video footage of BSO performances.
The Philadelphia Orchestra is releasing weekly treasures from its archives, as well as solo performances from musicians’ homes via its Virtual Philadelphia Orchestra platform.
And the New York Philharmonic just announced the archival trove of NY Phil Plays On, a “new portal for free content to provide comfort and connection to the millions of classical music fans worldwide in isolation.” It’s part of CEO Deborah Borda’s approach to staying connected to the Phil’s audiences, while preparing it for “the next series of unforeseen events.”
There is certainly something soothing about recognizing the emotions we’re feeling now in music cast forth through hundreds of years.