twang twang twang - MUNICH

John Mayer

Oblivious to the Zeitgeist, I have not been researching Wagner, but rather the opposite: French music between 1917-1930. More of that when I get back to broadband on Monday (and when I don’t have to get up incredibly early, drive to Lancashire and play the Force of Destiny). For now, a post about a very special concert I heard tonight: the John Mayer memorial concert at the Stratford Flute Festival.

I was lucky enough to get to know John when Catherine Goodman and I commissioned a flute and harp work from him. Nava Rasas consists of nine short movements based on the ancient Indian aesthetic concept of the nine rasas. “Rasa” means “juice, essence” or “flavour” and is an artistic means of expressing emotion. There are nine rasas, because the system believes there are nine principal emotions we all feel: wonder, laughter, love, calm, disgust, pathos, heroism, fear and anger. Mayer’s oeuvre consistently draws on his dual background in Western and Indian musical traditions (he was an Anglo-Indian from Calcutta), and also capitalizes on other musics. The Indo-Jazz fusions for which he became best known naturally combine the improvisatory qualities of Indian classical and Western Jazz.

John was killed earlier this year when he was mown down by a jeep near his home in North London.

He wrote much flute music, perhaps because the Indian and Western flutes are so closely related, and that is what we heard tonight. Padma Phool (flute, sitar and tabla); Alaap and Kirtan (flute, sitar); Tri Meuerti Deva (“The Hindu Trinity” – flute, piano); Conversation Piece (flute, piano) and Sri Krishna (also flute, piano) were all played by assorted festival students, John’s son Jonathan on sitar, Sandip Chakravarty on tabla and Zoe Smith at the piano.

Because my father is a Bengali translator, I have been brought up surrounded both by Indians and Indian music and, when we premiered Nava Rasas in January 2003, it was wonderful personally to take some small part in this tradition. It has an intensely spiritual quality, but it is not our jealous God with our penitents, scapegoat, blood and tears. John was a devout Roman Catholic, but shows typically Indian religious tolerance and inclusion in his allusions to Indian deities – “The Hindu Trinity” of Brahma, Shivanataraj [Shiva] and Vishnu (the three movements) being the clearest example. Spirituality is the project of much Western music too, but to my ears it can be obscured by cleverness for cleverness’ sake; pretension; lack of rehearsal time (I suppose this may be the case in India too, but the intense guru-disciple tradition makes it more difficult than a militant orchestra going “for goodness’ sake, we all know this one”); jadedness or complacency.

John was kind, tolerant, inquisitive, passionate and often hilarious. I am blessed to have known him and to have played his music. I desperately want him to write me a work for harp and sitar, and he is no longer here to do it, and I am too young to even know how to think of this with any understanding. It was beautiful to hear his music played. Its vitality was once more fresh and immediate and John spoke to me as if he were only in the next room.

Update - 31.08.04 - a poem my father wrote in memory of John.

THE TENTH RASA

in memory of John Mayer

‘What I’m doing is taking the raga and making a harmonic structure out of it, but never adding to the notes that are already there.’
Notes to John Mayer’s Indo-Jazz Fusions (Nimbus Records, 1998)

The god Apollo (dream a myth that’s new, not old),
In his dark-skinned, Kolkata dockworker-fathered avatar, was judged by nobody
As grand as the Nine Muses when he matched violin,
Not lyre, against the flute not of ass-eared, blundering Marsyas
But milkmaid-delighting Krishna! The Nine Rasas listened; pronounced them equal.
No triumph; no flaying; just joy at each other’s music.
Apollo crossed the dark water; the radiant coat that Krishna
Gave him, stitched from the notes of ragas, felt thin
In England. Jazz filled out the notes. The tenth Rasa,
Hope, burst out in applause, exploding like an all-seeing star.

William Radice
August 2004

Improving things

I took this post off in a fit of self-doubt, but as the lovely George Hunka reckons it avoids navel gazing, I shall put it back up. I am also Staying In tonight thanks to a filthy cold, with the world's least hot and undecongesting curry. I suppose the timidity of the Stratford curry houses has something to do with all the tourists. They were videoing each other getting off the coach in a carpark the other day. I should've got a balti in Birmingham on my way back from moonlighting in Liverpool. The RLPO supply a harp so I got to go by train, which was terribly exciting, but also dirty, smelly, crowded, delayed and took just as long as going by car, so I resolve not to complain about always driving in future (and you can honk and wheeze all you like without attracting filthy looks from your fellow passengers).

Yes, I am in Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of my hero, Shakespeare. I never tire of this part of the world – the “garden of England”, with its green and pleasant lanes, thatched cottages and general perfume of our greatest poet still hanging in the air. I have even got a review which describes me as a “promiscuous harpist” (because I played the Mozart concerto with three different students).

The erudite atmosphere has inspired me to another list: of some things, musical or otherwise, the experience of which I feel has made me a better human being.

- Menuhin’s recording of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata
- Shakespeare, especially Caliban’s “be not afeard” speech from the Tempest
- Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
- Pere Goriot
- A painting by Munch of two people arm in arm looking at a forest, whose title I shall add as soon as I get home and look it up
- Mahler 10
- This Is Hardcore (the song, not the album)
- Eleanor Rigby, Help The Aged (the Pulp song) & my experiences looking after old people when I finished my A Levels
- The audience’s tears of joy and relief when the lesbian opera I worked on in New York was premiered – the first overtly lesbian opera ever, unless you count Berg’s Lulu.
- Shostokovich 4, first movement
- WH Auden- as much the photographs of him as the poems
- The prayers at my best friend’s wedding. I go to an awful lot of weddings but these ancient Celtic prayers were beautiful, beautifully read and in an atmosphere of complete and solemn stillness in a deeply rural church on the cold, wild Weardale moors
- Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro; Damase’s Theme and Variations. When you play these you feel like you are flying
- Rabindranath Tagore’s “Endless Love”
- Mozart’s 13 Wind

The Tortoise and the Hare

I have been doing a lot of chamber music with conservatoire-level students recently. Both they and I have been juggling our sessions with other things, and they have responded magnificently to the challenge to get the concerts ready fast. They have had a baptism of fire, but a useful one. If they are to become professional musicians they have got to be able to do this, particularly in Britain, where it is not unusual for the conductor to remark in rehearsal “well, I’m sure we all know this one” and finish early, leaving the deputy first flute quaking if he has not played Beethoven Five before.

Nonetheless limited rehearsal time is not beneficial to chamber music. Really good chamber concerts have exquisite attention to detail. There are not enough of you to carry rough patches, as might happen at an orchestral outdoor prom date; nor can a brilliant soloist distract from a mediocre pianist bashing away in the background. To achieve this fine-tuning you need a lot of rehearsals, and you also need time together, to develop a mature sympathy with each other. Additionally much of the chamber repertoire is exceptionally technically and musically demanding, and if the students are unfamiliar with working with a harp as an equal partner, they need to be taught not to treat it in the same way they would the audition pianist, but to interact and blend their sound.

Quickly prepared concerts have their upsides: you not only learn to fall on your feet but reflect that concerts are so much more rewarding if you practice and rehearse uncompromisingly.

I think I’m just a bit tired of feeling like an idiot on the concert platform because everything is OK, but there is so much more to do: and having to pretend that all is wonderful, because then these students will believe that this is what fine chamber music-making is. I wouldn’t mind so much if we said frankly “that was a good job under the circumstances, but I never want to hear intonation like that again at the end of the long note in bar 8, and every time the harp plays a chord she is fractionally behind you, so we must work to breathe and move exactly together.”

Tomorrow I get to go and sightread arias to accompany Russell Watson, which I’m sure will make me feel ever so much better.

Top Ten

Still on the road, accessing the internet with arthritic speed from my mobile phone. But I am nothing if not determined, and see Alex Ross has recently listed his favourite pop tracks. . Inspired by this and by the return of the Sun Brothers' blog, here are mine.

- Pulp: This Is Hardcore
- The Divine Comedy: A Short Album About Love
- Bill Withers - Easy Like Sunday Morning
- The Beatles - Revolver (Alex lists the White Album, which is a virtuosic album, but I've always warmed more to Revolver, like I prefer Eliot's The Waste Land to Four Quartets)
- Alabama 3 - Woke Up This Morning (and no, not because of the Sopranos, although I do wish I wasn't always at a gig when it's on)
- U2 - Mysterious Ways
- The Sun Brothers - Unto Thine Own Self Be True
- The Smiths - Heaven Knows, I'm Miserable Now
- The Clash - London Calling
- Isaac Hayes - Shaft
- Dorothy Ashby - In A Minor Groove (much better than Alice Coltrane's jazz harp, with all due respect)
- Paul Weller - Heavy Soul
- The Doors - LA Woman

This probably reads like an idiot's introduction to pop experts, but I am a classical harpist so I reckon I qualify for the special needs register.

Heaven knows, I'm miserable now

Apologies for recent blogging silence. I have been up and down the country playing the harp, which is what I do in my spare time when I am not on the internet. Everytime I get on here I resolve to post something short and pithy about some genius underground band I have discovered, but instead you get another long post about The Future Of Classical Music.

I have been thinking about my June earlier post on Pulp. Why is it that to sell classical music we have happy-clappily to release compilations of relaxing, soothing, uplifting etc etc classics, but pop musicians are allowed to make music that is dark, sad, satirical or sharp as well. Indeed, you only get anywhere in the pop industry if you release music with something original to say, unless you want your fanbase to consist of ten-year-old girls. If you will only entertain happy thoughts it’s much harder to find a new direction. You can do it if there’s about to be a World Cup, but we always lose the football anyway so we return, again, to complex mixed feelings.

This post discusses what the effects of a more emotionally rounded approach to commercial classical production might be.

It has not escaped the classical music industry that useful lessons can be learned from pop. We have brooding publicity shots; stylish clothes (although taffeta still lurks); attractive merchandise (rush to buy your Harp Quartet CD NOW!). Equally there is nothing wrong at all with the Classic FM website being user-friendly and quite entertaining, with some good CDs on the recommended list. There is more variety, depth and free exchange of ideas on the Radio 3 homepage than there is in the whole of the Classic FM site, but not everybody’s fathers have paid for years of expensive music lessons so they can pinpoint an especially fine hemiola, and Classic FM is getting people listening.

So let classical music be easy on the eye, charismatically presented and approachable. All of that can only be to the good. What is less good is if the music becomes too easy, because it isn't all that easy and that is why it is a sophisticated and subtle art form, not elevator music. If you only read magazines, they get boring very quickly (I should know, for this week I have read Heat, Stars, Hello, Eve, Marie-Claire, More!, Glamour, OK and New Woman). Only to whistle a happy tune impoverishes the emotional depth of our art form and renders it something to iron to, not listen to. Would Ravel’s Introduction et Allegro be so sunlit if his Pavane were not so poignant? Would a symphony that never went into a minor key not be dull?

I have made my Emotional Poverty point before, so here is another about Social Relevance. One of the heaviest charges lobbed at classical music is that it is out of touch with our modern lives. Why not dare to promote some satirical music – Jerry Springer the Opera, for example, as as much a part of opera as Tosca, and not merely a sensational novelty? Jerry has been astonishingly (to everybody who said how ghastly) successful, because it is about something people can relate to. Or why not risk some electronic fusion music on Classic FM? I recorded the soundtrack for Fendi’s Milan show earlier this year. It was a combination of my and other musicians’ improvisations and electronic music, all put together by Paul Fryer in the art form in itself known as production. He did an amazing job, but his CDs are hidden in niche fashion stores. Why can’t the high street give them a try? They're quick enough to copy Fendi's handbags.

It is a mistake to patronise your audience. A good example is cruise ship recitals, where you are implored by your management to play nothing more strenuous than Canon in D. I would never go on and play Berio, but when Catherine and I were on the QE2 by the time we got to recital 6 we had run out of light repertoire and had to move on to the heavy virtuoso stuff. After some debate we concluded our last concert with Damase’s Variations “Early Morning” for flute and harp. It was received more rapturously than all our classics for pleasure. Sound Collective similarly programmes difficult repertoire, but presents it accessibly, with pre-performance talks and wall displays. Those who come to our concerts from Vivaldi by stuttering candlelight at St Martin's can't believe their luck, or how interesting a classical concert can be.

Briefly to sidestep banging the drum for classical social relevance, George Hunka makes an excellent point about the transcendent project of classical forms, in his post on elitism :

"What operates in us during an aesthetic experience is open to intellectual interpretation, but it is not that intellectual experience that draws us to the true core of its meaning. Properly speaking, no aesthetic experience is difficult or easy, elitist or populist. What works on us in a great work of theater or music is, among other things, its emergence from a long line of work, an eternal community of artists who have found similar urgings and means of expression important. Every individual work of art is potentially an entrance into the history and the meaning (if such it can be called) of art and to the potential transformative experience of art. An art form like music or theater, rooted in the collective past of the species, validates us humbly as mere individual participants in a greater history."

George also remarks in more recent reflections on modern theatre:

"The Fringe festival, as a barometer of the current health of the form amongst its young practitioners, the up-and-coming rather than the down-and-going, demonstrates a preoccupation with the trivial, the ephemeral. Even in the professional theater, there are signs that critics and craftspeople have thrown in the towel when it comes to the transformative potential of the form."

When you popularise classical forms you run the risk of debasing them (violinists in wet T-shirts), and that there is a transcendent and aspirational mission in the classical arts. That is why they are so fine and we are the richer for knowing them. Surely classical music would become more popular if it were promoted as such, and its relationship between the contemporary and the eternal, for want of a better word, made clearly known. So many people are taking up yoga, meditation, alternative therapies, crystal healing, or moving to the countryside to run B&Bs, because they are dissatifisfied with a superficial fast-lane modern culture. They are looking for something better.

Pop music already engages with the obvious and human need for emotional release and shared experience. That is why it is popular. Classical music can do all this too: music can do this. It beats me why marketeers either have to release bikini-clad Boogie on Bach, or bind Beethoven up with class and snobbery and sniggering if you clap in between movements, and think that either will work.

Thank goodness I am off to Berlin in a couple of weeks to seek transcendental epiphanic experiences in underground electro-experimental avante-garde Neuklassik.

Yoof

Can someone suggest to me why, when educated pampered middle-class children were invited to come and have a look at the harps after our concert on Sunday, they climbed and stamped all over them and not one said "thank you", but when I went today to play at a special school, children with all sorts of different and profound handicaps were quiet, interested, responsive, gentle and appreciative?

Left moved and humbled.

a popular view?

An interesting rant by k-punk about Glastonbury. An equally interesting response by be-jazz.

As Alex Ross has said before, not just classical music that has these arguments about progression versus the establishment.

Also see Greg Sandow's excellent post about the Pulitzer music prize hoo-hah:

"But have classical composers created the best and most important American music of the past 50 years? That's the main question we ought to ask. And the answer, pretty clearly, is no. Or, to be more careful, that classical composers have created some of the most memorable music, but very far from all of it."

Alex Ross pithily remarks:

"Amazing that we work in a business where that last sentence is some kind of controversial and necessary declaration, rather than a statement of the screamingly obvious."

My two cents on elitism

There has been a bevvy of blogging about whether classical music is elitist. ACD opens the case for the proposition with the belief that it inherently and inevitably is; Alex Ross opposes; Jessica Duchen makes a good point about the relationship between music and the establishment when it comes to assigning the blame for elitism.

UPDATE: In SuperfluitiesGeorge Hunka makes a good case for elitism from a carefully and purely aesthetic perspective, which has given me food for thought.

I printed all the stuff out to read at my gig tonight playing classical music for people of incredible wealth and privilege.

Elitism is a complex term and to have a good debate you have to define it properly. It can be good - keeping up standards, or a luxury product like a fancy car. It can be bad - damn you, Oxbridge, with your elitist refusal to offer stupid people places. It can be good and bad at the same time, like the English public school system which will give you an education about 10000 times more thorough than the free one, but you run the risk of emerging a chinless wonder unable to talk to girls. Tricky word, elitism: heavily dependent on context, and slippery in its significance.

The other definition at the crux of this whole debate is obviously the nature of classical music. Before we can decide whether it is elitist, we have to decide what it is in itself. I do not believe in naieve art: golden notes floating in the ether for our transcendental delight. It's an oxymoron anyway as art means artifice and shaping. An art form is always created (formed) by a human being, and we are invariably molded as much by our nurture as our nature; our cultural influences, political climate and social class. As soon as we learn a language we express ourselves through a specific cultural tradition. Some people rebel more against their conditioning than others, but to rebel against something means you are nonetheless affected by it.

So classical music is linked to class; to politics; to society. National anthems express patriotic fervour or political spin; when we sing hymns we evoke religious belief, and when I play background music, it is ostensibly to raise the tone of the evening. Wagner's music is political. I know there has been much holding forth on how the music is free from his anti-semitism, but while there may be no Fagin or Shylock in his operas (although Beckmesser's not far off), there is always Wagner himself, buying into the cast of the ruling German, and hater of the Jews:

"[Wagner] was incredibly voluble, filling Europe with his pronouncements, projects, and music, all of which went together and all of which were larger than life, more impressive, more designed to overwhelm and compel the listener than those of every other composer. At the center of all his work was his own fantastically self-concerned, even narcissistic self, which he considered in no uncertain way to embody the essence of the German soul, its destiny, and its privileges."

Edward Said, 'Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo', Parallels and Paradoxes (London, 2003)

Thus, classical music, like any art form, cannot help being contextualised, and the context alters as time goes by. Elitism is a similarly shifting concept and is equally dependent on context, specifically to reveal whether it is for the good or the bad.

I can see where ACD is coming from when he argues classical music's superiority: "music's very apotheosis; the one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music's other instantiations." I don't know what "instantiation" means, but ACD echoes Spenser and Dryden, nostalgic for the muses from which the word 'music' comes, and the Elizabethan world picture where hierarchy was all. Hierarchies are also dear to ACD: "essential to the well-being of Homo sapiens".

Unfortunately since the 16th-18th centuries when queens walked on gentleman's cloaks and thousands of serfs perished because Peter the Great felt like ordering a city to be built on marshland in the middle of the Russian winter, hierarchies have moved on. Should Jessica or I not be blogging because women should be at home looking after the children? Should we diagnose illness from an inbalance in the humours? Six million died for Wagner and Hitler's hierarchies.

Hierarchies, elites, move with the times. The French guillotined their aristocrats; it is common, in this country, for a Lord to look like the farm help (posh people are very scruffy at home), although I couldn't say whether an aristocrat in the States could not emulate a redneck, as ACD argues. Music, thank goodness, moves on too, otherwise I would have to listen to early music all the time instead of Alabama 3. Where do you draw the line? ACD does not name one composer in his piece, so I don't know what he includes in his music that will not "pander to proles". Is contemporary music classical music or new music? Where does it belong in ACD's hierarchy? What about the Toy symphony, or Elizabethan pub songs, now available in the classical section of record shops?

Context goes deeper than a historical or cultural period, too. Context is different for different people. Some are moved by Mozart; others by Radiohead, and it is not for us to dictate how or what others should love. I am all for music education but disturbed by ACD's fundamentalist rhetoric:

"The alpha and omega of it is that a hardcore audience for classical music can, in huge part, be created only by targeting the very young. If you fail to get 'em very young, you mostly don't get 'em at all."

Personal response, and the fluid relationship between self and society is what drives creativity. It is always changing and that is why it is called creativity, not re-creativity.

Trying to hang onto the past as it always was, instead of refiguring it for our times, makes a museum piece out of the vibrant, living, creative art that is music, classical or otherwise. That is not to reject the past, or the classical music canon: we study history to find out who we were and thereby how we have come to be who we are, because all societies must interrogate themselves to develop. Historically authentic performances can be brilliant, interesting and re-inform our times. but by the same token I prefer to play a modern harp: it has been developed technically, and it sounds better.

Bad elitism comes from hanging onto value structures that have become exclusive and obsolete: old hierarchies. Good elitism comes from engaging creatively with past and present, and shaping a work of art that is both lovely and has something to say to somebody beholding it - as Ross describes, "worth loving". Populism does not exclude elites, only bad ones. I don't understand, if classical music is a "vast, life-nourishing sea" for ACD, why he concludes bleakly that "one cannot define anything as "worth loving." It contradicts his hymn of praise. He has many good points, but his argument is confused. There is nothing wrong with admiring our great composers as masters of their art: quite the reverse; they must be remembered because we are the richer for hearing them. But we are human beings - not really homo sapiens any more - and we live in the here and now, not days gone by. We have to relate works of art to ourselves if we are to understand and to love them: this is how art stays alive, and we form our own elites, or should do. The past is heavily implicated in the fashioning of contemporary relevance, but nothing lives forever. And that is a good thing. The Sybil, who asked for immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth, is a lesson in letting go and moving on.

"We are always living in someone's Golden Age."

(Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love)

backhander

I won a competition yesterday :) . I do hope the judges were not operating along these lines but in the teabreak a member of the audience said to me:
"LOVELY - I'd have voted for you if you hadn't played a note!"

All you nine-hours-a-day pianists out there - you work too hard. Just wheel an enormous piece of gilded carving out front with the maximum of fuss, palaver and time-consumption, tune for hours, give your handbag to the long-suffering organiser, then play out of tune and moan about how when someone turned over their programme page it caused a string to break.

The Music

This is a f***ing brilliant article by Alex Ross. He is 36 and I am 24, and if I can write something like this in 12 years' time I will be well pleased.

The first thing to note is that Ross immediately dispenses with the categorisation of "classical", "popular" or
"jazz", preferring to talk instead about "the music", which I shall copy.

Like many New Yorker articles, Ross's piece is outstandingly researched. God knows how many books I will have to read or CDs to listen to to learn about all this stuff. But its knowledge is, of course, its strength: it draws comparisons between different musics and epochs. If you can compare things, you can interrogate them. This questioning process is essential if you are ever truly to feel you believe something:

"For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre élitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider some of the rival names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious; but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values."

Questioning and development is also what keeps the music alive. What is the point of an old fart prophecy of doom? Where does it lead? And what of the new does it entertain? Once you start lamenting the Good Old Days it is a sign you have grown old and begun to talk rubbish. Compare the beauty of a sea-change:

"The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is an ageless diva on a non-stop farewell tour...Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. For now, it is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in one of his Preludes—a city that chants beneath the waves."

So, let us have Knowledge, and Research and Open-Mindedness, and through these Perception. Ross stresses another crucial aspect of thinking about music: joining mind and heart. Why be clever if you do not apply your wit to something you adore? I could've become an accountant and not have to worry where my next eyelash tint is coming from (it's hell being blonde sometimes).

I read English. I did so because even at 18 I was disenchanted with musicology. I love(d) music, but not the analyses which pass themselves off as academic worthies. Nothing I read was ever more than merely descriptive. If I want to know that a symphonic movement modulates into the subdominant minor, I can tell you that myself, because I can read music: I want to know what the effect of that modulation is, and why it is beautiful and lovely. Lit crit, it seemed to me at the time, had greater emotional involvement and more humane analysis: ergo, it would make me a better musician.

"The critic Greg Sandow recently wrote in his online journal that we partisans of the classical need to speak more from the heart about what the music means. He admits that it’s easier to analyze his ardor than to express it."

It is easier to analyze than to express, because analysis can be learnt technically: expression must be inspired from within. If I practice for nine hours a day, I will be able to play fast scales very well. I will not necessarily be able to light up Carnegie Hall. From the start Ross draws a vital comparison with pop music, where nobody feels they cannot discuss a song in terms of what makes it great, as opposed to the parts without the sum (cf my post on Pulp):

"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."

The irony in why Ross even has to bother spelling the music's need to move with the times and draw out new comparisons and directions, and the need to engage emotionally with the music, is that music itself welcomes these approaches with open arms. It is us, some of the audience, musicians and critics, who are at fault. The sort of people who say they prefer "classical music" because they feel it is appropriate to whatever social class they aspire to be, but would be hard pushed to name more composers than Bach, Beethoven and Mozart:

"The original classical is left in an interesting limbo. It has a chance to be liberated from the social clichés that currently pin it down. It is no longer the one form carrying the burden of the past. Moreover, it has the advantage of being able to sustain constant reinterpretation, to renew itself with each repetition. The best kind of classical performance is never a retreat into the past but rather an intensification of the present. When you hear a great orchestra perform Beethoven’s “Eroica,” it isn’t like a rock band trying to mimic the Beatles—it is like the Beatles re-incarnated. The mistake that apostles of the classical have always made is to have joined their love of the past to a dislike of the present. The music has other ideas: it hates the past and wants to escape."

And similarly, as Ross concludes:

"Two centuries ago, Beethoven bent over the manuscript of the “Eroica” and struck out Napoleon’s name. It is often said that he made himself the protagonist of the work instead. Indeed, he engendered an archetype—the rebel artist hero—that modern artists are still recycling. I wonder, though, if Beethoven’s gesture meant what people think it did. Perhaps he was freeing his music from a too specific interpretation, from his own preoccupations. He was setting his symphony adrift, as a message in a bottle. He could hardly have imagined it travelling two hundred years, through the dark heart of the twentieth century and into the pulverizing electronic age. But he knew it would go far, and he did not weigh it down. There was now a torn, blank space on the title page. The symphony became a fragmentary, unfinished thing, and unfinished it remains. It becomes whole again only in the mind and soul of someone listening for the first time, and listening again. The hero is you."

Shakespeare is the greatest poet who ever lived because his work has the most breathtaking universal relevance. You can, as an intense young man, find your Hamlet; as a jealous lover who mishandles things, your Othello; thirteen-year-olds in love always believe nobody has ever loved like this before, like Juliet; Lear's shaky tragedy is shared by so many foolish, fond old men; so many dead Yoricks, alive, have set the table on a roar. And he is a poet, too, because his lines are musical; they work their way into our hearts as well as our minds; into our entire souls. Music is the most emotionally immediate art form. It cannot avoid being intensely of its time, but it also has great permanence. But it will only do so if it is allowed to sound in the silence: be heard by people living after we are dead - resounded.