The evolution of the Grand Piano of 1909 from the Spinet of 1670 (c. 1910)
Photo: Getty Images
Music is the most mysterious of all the arts. Incorporeal and seemingly without intelligible meaning, it nonetheless has a powerful effect on most of those who hear it—though not all. Exactly what does it do to and for us, and why are certain people incapable of responding to its power? While scientists agree that music does something to the human brain that results in the giving of pleasure, there is no agreement about its nature, and the bald word “pleasure” fails to come anywhere near suggesting the overwhelming experience of listening to, say, “The Rite of Spring” or Duke Ellington’s 1940 recording of “Ko-Ko” (as opposed to his 1956 recording of the very same piece, which isn’t nearly so powerful…and why should that be so?).
Not the least of music’s mysteries is that so many of us turn to it in times of trial. That’s what Philip Kennicott did a few years ago. A once-promising pianist who is now the senior art and architecture critic of the Washington Post, Mr. Kennicott decided to try to learn Bach’s Goldberg Variations after the death of his mother, a frustrated musician who had longed when young to be a violinist. Her failure to do so, he says, left her “unfulfilled and angry about what she sensed was a wasted life.” Conversely, his own purpose in grappling as an adult with one of the most challenging pieces in the keyboard repertoire, as he explains in his new book, “Counterpoint: A Memoir of Bach and Mourning,” was “to test life again, to press upon it and see what was still vital.”
Anyone who has resorted to music under like circumstances, whether as a player or merely a listener, will find much to ponder in Mr. Kennicott’s reflections. One of them, though, struck me particularly hard, not because it recalled my own experience but because it didn’t: “I bristle at the idea that music is consoling or has healing power. It is a cliché of lazy music talk, the sort of thing said by people who give money to the symphony and have their names chiseled on the wall of the opera house….Consolation helps us order our thoughts so that life is less painful. Very often these are clichés like the ones I repeated myself while my mother was dying; for some people they are bromides found on calendars and inspirational posters; for many others, they are the wishful thinking that grounds religion.”
I scarcely know where to start disagreeing. To be sure, most of the over-familiar words spoken by those who sympathize by rote with the plight of a mourner or caregiver are ineffectual at best, irksome at worst, leaving you with no choice but to paste a fixed half-smile on your face and say something equally meaningless in response. But music is different, in part because it speaks another, deeper language. When Beethoven, who understood suffering well, gave a copy of his Missa Solemnis to Austria’s Archduke Rudolf, he inscribed it as follows: “From the heart—may it return to the heart!” Moreover, countless listeners have similarly testified to the power of music to miraculously bypass the greeting-card banalities of reassurance and help heal a shattered heart.
A piece by Beethoven that is often cited in precisely that connection is the Cavatina of his String Quartet in B-Flat, Op. 130 A chorale-like slow movement, its solemn harmonies give way briefly to a halting, almost stammering interlude marked “beklemmt,” which is German for “oppressed.” But then the opening chorale returns in all its gentle dignity, cleansing the air of fear and trembling and reminding us of how Beethoven told a friend that this movement “cost the composer tears in the writing and brought out the confession that nothing that he had written had so moved him.” Rare is the listener who can hear what the violinist and conductor Angus Watson has called “the most consoling melody that Beethoven ever composed” without being transported to a place of order, reassurance and—yes—healing.
As it happens, Mr. Kennicott himself leaned on music during his mother’s last days. “Bach was the only music I could listen to,” he writes, “the only music that didn’t seem trivial, insipid, or irrelevant to life….It kept banal things at bay, while bringing profound things close enough to be felt without being engulfed by their dread darkness.” And Bach and Beethoven are not the only kinds of music equal to that task. When Richard Brookhiser was undergoing chemotherapy, for instance, he found that the only music he could bear to hear was the Goldberg Variations and the records of Louis Armstrong : “Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through.”
I quoted that sentence in “Pops,” my biography of Armstrong, struck not just by the juxtaposition of artists but also by the simple eloquence of Mr. Brookhiser’s tribute to the miracle of music. How it does what it does may forever be a mystery, but few of those who have felt its awe-inspiring power are likely to doubt that great music can soothe a bruised soul.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, is the author of “Satchmo at the Waldorf.” Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"sound" - Google News
February 21, 2020 at 12:07AM
https://ift.tt/2vV9PJ5
The Sound of Comfort - Wall Street Journal
"sound" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MmdHZm
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment