Why Classical Music Matters To Me

[Haydnseek]

Why Classical Music Matters To Me

http://www.gramophone.co.uk/interviews_ ... sp?id=2507

As The Gramophone enters its second 'millennium', we offer a health-check for classical music and ask musicians, record industry executives and arts administrators to explain why they can't live without classical music

Conductors

MARIN ALSOP
Principal conductor of the Bournemouth SO and music director designate of the Baltimore SO

Listening to great music can transport us instantly to another time, another world, another culture, and connect us to other human beings on the highest emotional level. To join other people in a concert hall as members of a broader community to share in a journey of the imagination and emotions can be a unique and deeply moving experience. In a world as disjointed and anonymous as ours has become, this type of authentic, life-affirming experience is all the more poignant. Connecting with the greatness of the human spirit is both inspiring and reassuring, and we need to reinforce the transcendence of humanity.

JOHN ELIOT GARDINER
Conductor and writer who won this year's Classic FM Gramophone Record of the Year for a disc of Bach sacred cantatas

Classical music is a force to be reckoned with in one's life: ubiquitous and at times overpowering. Yet the more we are captivated by any single piece or composer, the more fugitive are the reasons why. Music leaves words struggling hopelessly in its wake. There are times when it can seem necessary to our very existence: music makes you feel that science and logic do not - cannot - map human life and emotion in its entirety. Listening to or playing a particular piece can provide a point of entry and a kind of 'reality' exposure to a realm of experience which no purely visual reconstruction can quite match for intensity. It links us to the (re-)creative process - the nearest many of us get to reconnecting with a pace and a rhythm different to the one which rules our everyday lives.

ALAN GILBERT
Chief conductor and artistic advisor to the Royal Stockholm PO, music director of Santa Fe Opera and principal guest conductor of the NDR SO

Classical music is one of the highest expressions of our humanity - it defines us and tells so much about who we are and what makes life worth living. Classical music is as necessary to our happiness, inspiration and understanding of life as the paintings of a great artist like Van Gogh or a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon. Conducting Britten's Peter Grimes at Santa Fe Opera this past summer was one of the highlights of the season for me. This is simply one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, a stunning piece of music and a powerful piece of theatre.

ANTONIO PAPPANO
Music director of the Royal Opera, Covent Garden

In this world of labels and compartmentalisation, I am increasingly uncomfortable with the word 'classical' in front of the word 'music'. Music, from the most sentimental of melodies to the most primitive pounding rhythms, provokes and/or demands us to feel. Nostalgia, sensuality, danger, curiosity, triumph - classical music can do it all.

DONALD RUNNICLES
Music director of the San Francisco Opera who in October conducted the world premier of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic

Albert Einstein once said, 'The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.' Classical music represents an apex of innovation inspired by the most original of instruments, the human voice. This supreme source was the catalyst of the imagination from which all other instruments were drawn and the music that is created has the power to challenge the imagination further yet, beyond its outermost realm. It is an invitation, an opportunity for all those who create it and all those who experience it to move and be moved. It is an invitation to bring the imagination to life. I am seized by any music that challenges the fabric of my understanding: any music that incites a forward motion into the unknown is music that wholly captivates my attention.

Instrumentalists and composers

MATT HAIMOVITZ
Cellist who has released a recording of Bach's cello suites for his own label, Oxingale

Classical music matters because music matters. Music provokes us, inspires us, moves us to a more acute understanding of our own nature. Whether the monophonic meditations of Hildegard, the polyphonous layers of Palestrina or a Bach fugue, the vivid conversation of a Haydn string quartet, the utopian vision of a Beethoven symphony, or folk and popular culture filtered into the compositions of Bartók or David Sanford, composers and performers from the classical tradition have absorbed and contributed to the socio-political atmosphere of their time and, through the most abstract and direct means - music - paved the way for some of the greatest achievements of the human imagination. Recently, performing Bach's Cello Suites in Cöthen - where Bach composed these masterpieces - I was flanked by two busts: in front of me Prince Leopold, a ruler who patronised music and musicians, and behind me the head of JS Bach. A wonderful metaphor: today, very few of us know anything about Prince Leopold, but hundreds of years later most of us know the name and have been touched by the music of Bach. Through changing political winds and the gulf of time, it is the composers we remember and revere.

PETER MAXWELL DAVIES
Master of the Queen's Music whose 'Naxos' String Quartet No 7 was premiered in October at the Wigmore Hall, London

Classical music is unique, in that its grammar, syntax and formal construction present an abstract discourse in time roughly equivalent to that of the most ambitious architecture in space, in which thematic material of contrasting functions is subjected to variation, development and transformation in organically consistent ways, with the tonic of the home key providing a sense of direction over large spans of time - not least harmonically - making multi-dimensionality possible in time, with an ever-changing focus between foreground, middle-ground and background, which as a vanishing point enables this to happen in space. This has no equivalent throughout civilisation.

SUSAN GRAHAM
Mezzo whose latest release is 'Poèmes de l'amour', vocal works by Chausson, Ravel and Debussy

Without classical music, life would be dumb. As in, dumbed-down. Much current pop music is banal, predictable, anti-emotional. I heard Strauss's Daphne recently, in a live performance at Carnegie Hall. More than once, I, a professional musician with over 15 years under my career belt, had goose bumps from the sheer depth of expression, turn of phrase, orchestration, and heart-stopping power of acoustic sound. And that's just Strauss. In this short statement, I can't even address Mozart, Handel, Mahler, Wagner, Stravinsky or Bach. Classical music makes us aspire to our better, higher selves intellectually and emotionally. It gives dimension to our often one-dimensional lives.

DANIEL HOPE
Violinist who has recently recorded a disc of Bach concertos with the COE for Warner Classics

Classical music is our link to the past. It is our connection with centuries of the greatest musical ideas, philosophies and ways of life. This profoundly rich heritage has been bequeathed to us and it us our duty and obligation to ensure that it is passed on to future generations. By getting inside the mind of a Bach, a Beethoven, a Schubert or a Brahms, we learn so much, not just about the past, but about ourselves. We learn how music has the power to change, to encourage, to comfort, to move and, most importantly, to inspire.

SUSAN TOMES
Pianist of the Florestian Trio who have recently released a disc of Mendelssohn for Hyperion

I don't claim that all classical music matters, or even that all of it matters to me. However, the best of it has more than mattered to me; it has been essential, helping me to digest life's experiences. It takes one's thoughts and feelings into a region beyond words, giving them depth and illumination. I'm fond of many kinds of music but outside classical music I haven't found the same ability to express layers of profound meaning and unexpected connections. Good classical music addresses the head, the heart and the spirit all at once, and can satisfy them all.

STEVEN ISSERLIS

Cellist who has recently released his second recording of the Brahms sonatas for Hyperion

My interest in classical music is not for its social powers; music matters to me because it has enriched my life immeasurably for as long as I can remember. I love it for its ability to transport us to worlds far more beautiful and satisfying than anything in our daily lives. While doing so, it unites us and affects us in a positive way; I'm sure that no one has ever committed a serious crime while humming a Mozart aria! So there are social benefits to classical music - but they are side issues. Music is music, and that's quite enough!

JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER
Cellist who writes on music for the Daily Telegraph

Classical music is as relevant today as ever. As politicians struggle, Daniel Barenboim has demonstrated how great music can unite nations with his inspirational West-Eastern Divan orchestra comprising equal numbers of young Arab and Israeli musicians. With a span of at least six centuries, containing some of mankind's greatest achievements, classical music holds a unique place in our society. Elgar's music is inextricably linked with nature and I would like to sit John Prescott down and play him a recording of Elgar's First Symphony in the hope that it might persuade him against yet further desecration of the English countryside.

Executives and arts administrators

CLIVE GILLINSON
Former MD of the London Symphony Orchestra who is also executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, New York

Perhaps the clearest demonstration that classical music matters was the forcible attempt to eliminate it in China during the Cultural Revolution. Throughout that period, classical music all but disappeared, although many extraordinary people risked their lives to hide scores, instruments and recordings. Since the end of that terrifying and destructive era, there has been what can only be described as an explosion in the popularity of classical music in China. Within a mere 30 years, remarkable Chinese performers and composers have become central to the world of classical music, and Chinese culture is becoming inextricably linked with the future development of classical music, as has been the case with so many of the world's great cultures. In addition, China TV recently launched a 24 hour classical music station! Not only does this tragic 'controlled experiment in elimination' demonstrate just how much classical music matters, it also clearly shows that it speaks to the human spirit across all cultures, and belongs to the whole world.

HERVE BOISSIERE
Director of Naïve Classique

Classical is a long-term music - we listen to it several centuries on, so I don't see any reason why it shouldn't continue. It's good music, quality music, and people feel this. For those who began buying records in the 1960s, tastes change and evolve. They still love The Beatles and the Beach Boys, but as they mature they look for something that brings not only the power of rock but something else, too. Though we at Naïve don't really talk about classical, or pop, or jazz - we talk about the artists. Categories are becoming more flexible, more and more open, so to keep classical in a specific category is a big mistake.

DARREN HENLEY
Station manager of Classic FM

Without doubt, classical music is the greatest of all musical genres. I believe passionately that it has the power to connect with people of all ages, classes and backgrounds up and down the country. It has a unique spiritual quality which engages listeners in a far more deep and meaningful way than other types of music. Increasingly, we're seeing examples of new and exciting ways of presenting live music which make the genre accessible and relevant to new audiences. Despite what the doom-mongers would have you believe, classical music is flourishing.

KLAUS HEYMANN
Founder and CEO of Naxos

Classical music, more than any other art form, can express an unlimited range of emotions and, at the same time, create these emotions in human beings. What other art form can make people unbelievably happy or unbelievably sad, with all shades in between? What can matter more than bringing happiness and enjoyment to a wide range of people from all walks of life and from many different cultures? Perhaps because it is capable of expressing the full range of human emotions the music of Mozart has become the most loved all over the world.

JUDE KELLY
Artistic director of the South Bank Centre, London, and chair of the arts, education and culture committee for the 2012 Olympics

One of the deepest joys for me of classical music is the opportunity to have access to the thinking of all the world's greatest composers as they elevate our human chaos into musical landscapes of exquisite complexity and coherence. How bereft the world would be if classical music - with all its sublime offerings - were ever to wither away, leaving us no access to the minds of the great musical thinkers from each generation. But that will never happen - posterity guards us against our own mental laziness and constantly reminds us that without Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo or Balanchine we would have no sense of the fullness of our own humanity. Living or dead, great artists of all kinds reveal layers of meaning and patterns of thinking that continue to reverberate over centuries.

NICHOLAS KENYON
Director of the BBC Proms

Music matters because it releases in us an immensely powerful creativity and spontaneity - something which is unpredictable, elemental, thrilling, but which can often struggle for recognition and reward in a world dominated by bottom lines and measurable targets. A new generation of musicians wants to imagine as well as to inspire: for this year's BBC Proms, young players worked with professionals to create and perform a new piece for the Albert Hall, Invisible Lines: an inspirational moment that gave a massive hope for the future.

DAVID MELLOR
Journalist and broadcaster who hosts Mellor's Masterworks at noon on Sundays on Classic FM

A great statesman once said 'a nation that does not respect its past has no future', and that is surely just as true in music. Classical music is quite simply the best of the past, the pieces with the quality to survive the winnowing fan of time. Classical music is everything that's best in music. I'm not against pop music but there's no emotion pop music can stimulate that can't be even more deeply felt in the classics.

CHRIS ROBERTS
President of Universal Classics & Jazz

Classical music, beyond being an art form, is a language without which we lose a connection to the past, present and future. It is a myth that classical music is dead or dying. I have never known anyone, young or old, who, when presented with the music on neutral ground, did not 'feel' it or understand it regardless of being able to identify it.

ALEX ROSS
Music critic of the New Yorker

Classical music, so-called, is an organism evolving furiously from year to year and day to day. The music that is ringing in my ears is John Adams's Doctor Atomic, which was finished in May of this year and first heard at the San Francisco Opera in October - a crypto-Wagnerian music drama about the creation of the atomic bomb, for which Adams has written some of the grandest, weirdest, most disturbingly beautiful music of his career. Masterpieces are still possible in our time, and some of the greatest works may be yet to come.

ROGER WRIGHT
Controller of BBC Radio 3

What better than to remember (in his centenary year) Michael Tippett's wonderful words that we are 'morally and emotionally enfeebled if we live our lives without artistic nourishment' and that 'in music we sense most directly the inner flow which sustains the soul'? Music is indeed, for me, the most powerful and subtle of all the arts in its power to stimulate, provoke and comfort us and make us question our existence -provided we are really listening!

JOHN TUSA
Managing director of London's Barbican Centre

Think of a world without the joys of Rossini, the consolations of Schubert, the ambiguities of Mozart, the austerities of Stravinsky, the complexities of Birtwistle, the diversions of Ligeti. No, don't; it would be too awful to endure. For at least 1000 years, from medieval plainchant to Renaissance polyphony, through two Viennese schools and on to contemporary minimalism, 'classical music' has demonstrated a continuing ability to adapt, form and reform itself, and divert into new codes, disciplines and shapes. Throughout this time 'classical music' has remained universal in its language, extending its reach globally in a remarkable way. If it wasn't also about exhilaration, exaltation, anguish, despair and pathos, it would not have survived or deserved to.

[jbuck919]

I am extremely fortunate to have the faculties plus the background for loving art music. It is not politically correct to say so, but most people do not, and they literally do not know what they are missing. But I was born to this, and that is not boasting because I can take no credit for that.

Any one difference in my life might have caused me to miss this. I might have been born into poverty or trouble or a non-cultured society. I might have had no talent. I might have just not had the right kind of brain (I cannot, for instance, draw to save my life). Above all, I might not have had a father who was a musician. That last was the crucial difference. Thanks, Dad.

[Ralph]

Take all those quotations and it's inarticulate me. The Gramophone article, which I'd already read, says it (almost) all.

I've missed at least five concerts in the past ten days because of my surgery and continuing recovery and I deeply feel a loss and it doesn't matter that much that I have scads of CDs (although I'm very happy to have that music library now).

There is no equivalent to sharing the joy of live music even as a passive listener.

[Haydnseek]

I think two of the comments most interesting to me were:

John Elliot Gardiner

Listening to or playing a particular piece can provide a point of entry and a kind of 'reality' exposure to a realm of experience which no purely visual reconstruction can quite match for intensity. It links us to the (re-)creative process - the nearest many of us get to reconnecting with a pace and a rhythm different to the one which rules our everyday lives.

Great music can evoke emotions you’ve never known, or never experienced so intensely before, or have forgotten. It enlarges you.

Klaus Heymann

Classical music, more than any other art form, can express an unlimited range of emotions and, at the same time, create these emotions in human beings. What other art form can make people unbelievably happy or unbelievably sad, with all shades in between? What can matter more than bringing happiness and enjoyment to a wide range of people from all walks of life and from many different cultures? Perhaps because it is capable of expressing the full range of human emotions the music of Mozart has become the most loved all over the world.

I’m not sure if Heymann’s words don’t apply to all great art, not music exclusively. I know people who feel the impact of great paintings profoundly and some of my own reactions to great theater or novels are quite on a level with my experiences of music. Classical music may be the most directly universal of arts, though, crossing, ethnic, national, social or whatever boundaries with remarkable ease.

[jbuck919]

If the point of the post was to comment on all those comments, fair enough. But not a single one of those responders said "classical music matters to me because it is obviously one of the highest art forms if not the highest ever known, and I love art not kitsch." That is politically incorrect, and every single response in the initial post here seems to me an evasion designed to enable the responder to get along with the overwhelming majority of people who do not know the difference between Beethoven and Roll Over Beethoven.

I strongly suspect that they interviewed more than one musician (Pierre Boulez, perhaps?) who called a spade a spade and simply refused to print his reply.

[Blip]

I am extremely fortunate to have the faculties plus the background for loving art music. It is not politically correct to say so, but most people do not, and they literally do not know what they are missing. But I was born to this, and that is not boasting because I can take no credit for that.

Any one difference in my life might have caused me to miss this. I might have been born into poverty or trouble or a non-cultured society. I might have had no talent. I might have just not had the right kind of brain (I cannot, for instance, draw to save my life). Above all, I might not have had a father who was a musician. That last was the crucial difference. Thanks, Dad.

Interesting, jbuck. I'm in the opposite camp: neither of my parents was musical. I discovered classical music largely on my own, though I did have a stimulus in conversation with some of my older brother's friends.

I started about 13 or 14 because I was dissatisfied with the pap we were being served on am radio. So who knows? You might have come to classical music despite your circumstances.

[Corlyss_D]

Cripes! That's like asking Bill Gates why Windows is important to him!

These people all make their livings in classical music. What did we expect them to say? "I'd rather dig ditches, but I had an aptitude for music"?

[jbuck919]

I am extremely fortunate to have the faculties plus the background for loving art music. It is not politically correct to say so, but most people do not, and they literally do not know what they are missing. But I was born to this, and that is not boasting because I can take no credit for that.

Any one difference in my life might have caused me to miss this. I might have been born into poverty or trouble or a non-cultured society. I might have had no talent. I might have just not had the right kind of brain (I cannot, for instance, draw to save my life). Above all, I might not have had a father who was a musician. That last was the crucial difference. Thanks, Dad.

Interesting, jbuck. I'm in the opposite camp: neither of my parents was musical. I discovered classical music largely on my own, though I did have a stimulus in conversation with some of my older brother's friends.

I started about 13 or 14 because I was dissatisfied with the pap we were being served on am radio. So who knows? You might have come to classical music despite your circumstances.

The possibility is there beyond a doubt. Many people here love classical music (and often appreiciate some things at a higher or at least different level than I do) purely on the basis of luck and circumstances (then there are just the better musicians). It might have been that way with me, but I would not have wished to take that chance. Many excellent connoisseurs here cannot read music. Speaking only for myself, my life depends on my ability to read music to the extent that it depends on my ability to read English.

[Cyril Ignatius]

I really like the collection of comments above. I also think jbuck hits the nail on the head in pointing out that many circumstances might deny a person the exposure to classical music. Yes, many people not initially exposed to music might come into it through various circumstances, but the larger picture seems to be that in many parts of modern society today, people grow up without the exposure. And today, it seems more cultural barriers than anything else.

William F. Buckley touched on this briefly in his recent memoirs, in his case remembering being put through daily piano practice as a child, a process that might seem demanding or rigorous to the child at the moment, but a formation which provides a basis for that kid to appreciate music much more fully as a grown-up.

I never got those piano lessons - my sisters and a brother did (okay, there was 14 of us kids and my Dad had died by the time I was past my toddler years) but we had much good music playing in the house on the record player. In fact, my Dad had brought much of that music in because he loved it) Years later when I became a connesoir of classical music, I taught myself an instrument. But how many kids never have that Beethoven music playing in the house growing up??? Millions and Millions!!