Music to the ear
Bring on Mozart, Bach . . . Heaven!
JOHN ADAMS once wrote to Abigail that he must study politics and war so that his sons could study mathemathics, commerce and agriculture. So their children in turn could study painting, poetry and music. Americans have always wanted something ever higher for their children and then their children’s children—till that golden day when men shall study war no more and can devote themselves to the arts, music high among them.
Music. It’s always seemed uncivilized that music should be considered only optional in American classrooms. (And poetry is being eased out, too, more’s the pity.) You can now get through a four-year high school curriculum without hearing a note of Mozart. These days you can even get a bachelor of the arts— of the arts— without taking even the simplest Music Appreciation class.
No, not all music is worth listening to. It may have been George Bernard Shaw who said Hell is full of amateur musicians. Take it from folks who’ve sat through elementary school band concerts: Nothing sounds worse than an off-key clarinet.
But there’s hardly a thing in the world that sounds as wonderful as Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major. They didn’t call Leopold’s boy the Divine Mozart for nothin’. Oh, those delicate opening notes. Coming down as if from Heaven, falling like mercy, gentle as the dew, note by note. So beautiful it’s almost unbearable. As if St. Cecilia, patron saint of musicians, had selected them herself.
How proud Papa Haydn must have been of his young admirer, who was so eager to please the old master that to this day W.A. Mozart pleases the whole world.
Or just listen to a college student who may not be quite a pro, but has been studying the clarinet for a dozen years. Strings have their admirers, and every band should have some brass. But woodwinds have a beauty like no other.
Want to join the discussion in detail, and get righteously offended in the process? Join the club. If all goes well, the discussion could begin at what is now the Men’s Gymnasium at the Uofa in Fayetteville in a couple of years—when it could be the new concert hall on campus.
Chancellor G. David Gearhart would like the gym to become a permanent concert hall. A venue that would seat some 700 entranced listeners. The current concert hall on campus, the Stella Boyle Smith, can seat only about 240. That’s just not big enough for a growing university. It opened in 1961 when the school had about 6,000 students. Today the Uofa has some 23,000.
EVEN NOW the university is taking the first steps toward renovating the gym. First thing first: money. As practical John Adams well knew, first we must study commerce to make the arts possible. That much has not changed in these only superficially different times. Now a university in a state that wasn’t even an American territory in his time is looking for potential donors to get this $15-million fund-raising drive under way. So music can rejuvenate that old gym, and the hearts of all who hear it and play it on campus. If the cash comes in, the Uofa can begin talking to architects.
Not that the Stella Boyle Smith hall would go unused. There are still acts/performances/recitals to be staged there. But there have been a lot of standing-room-only concerts at the hall, and it’s time for a bigger space to showcase all of that music.
Once the university’s fine school of architecture moves its materials out of the gymnasium, when the renovation of Vol Walker Hall is finished sometime in the next two years, the gym can be used for another purpose: Music! The architecture of sound.
What a glorious prospect. Surely the music department would let the rest of the campus, and the rest of Northwest Arkansas for that matter, listen in.