Why ‘I Hate Music’

This blog title is certainly to be taken tongue-in-cheek.  I don’t hate music but what I do hate—and what I think the Bernstein song that inspired the title was getting at—is the culture of what classical music has become.  Stuffy concert-halls, egotistical performers, interpretations that must follow a standardized formula based on modernly-conceived “rules” of tradition.  I hope to explore many of the contentions I have with the classical music world through this blog.

I did not begin to truly enjoy music until just a couple years ago.  There are only a couple books that have changed my life: the Bible, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, William Westney’s “The Perfect Wrong Note” and Kenneth Hamilton’s “After the Golden Age”.  The last I read over Christmas break in the first year of my master’s degree and found it such a relief.  I will surely talk about it a great deal later so suffice to say now: it addressed a side of making music that was lost in the 20th century.  It inspired me to listen to the oldest recordings of pianists who studied in the 19th century.  We have on record performances by people who were trained in the musical style of the time in which the great piano canon was created.  These recordings sound bizarre but here are the performance practice of Liszt and of Chopin, of Brahms and Schumann, even of Mozart and Beethoven.  And yet it is not the performance practice propagated by performers today, whether or not they claim to be authentic interpreters.

Music was openly subjective back in “the day”.  Says Richard Taruskin (another hero of mine, though he certainly goes over the top on occasion, and his repulsion towards contemporary music is alarming) regarding music as museums and performers as curators: “In musical performance, neither what is removed nor what remains can be said to possess an objective ontological existence akin to that of dust or picture.  Both what is ‘stripped’ and what is ‘bared’ are acts and both are interpretations—unless you can conceive of a performance, say, that has no tempo, or one that has no volume or tone color.  For any tempo presupposes choice of tempo, any volume choice of volume, and choice is interpretation.” (Texts and Acts, page 150).

I have arrived at the point that anything claiming to be music is worth a listen.  Popular, classical, why must we even make the distinction?  I believe to tout the genius of composers of the past, or the inerrancy of a musical score is to do a severe disservice to our art and the satisfaction we can get out of performing that art.  I used to be more close-minded, in music and all walks of life.  I knew what I believed, that I was ‘right’ and I arrogantly defended my positions.  Just a few years ago I would have openly shot down my two great music loves: Liszt and contemporary music.  Now I could be satisfied playing both, or either, for the rest of my life.  Music—in the most subjective and therefore true sense—should never be boring and it should always throw you for a loop once in a while.

Final thoughts go to Alex Ross in a great article in the New Yorker from a few years ago: “Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world. This morning, for me, it was Sibelius’s Fifth; late last night, Dylan’s ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’; tomorrow, it may be something entirely new. I can’t rank my favorite music any more than I can rank my memories. Yet some discerning souls believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an inferior popular product. They say, in effect, ‘The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.’ They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak the language of high-end real estate. They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. If it is worth loving, it must be great; no more need be said.”