Whenever I write this column, and most other times, I have music playing in the background. On this day it’s the Sonata in A by Gabriel Faure with Itzhak Perlman and Emanuel Ax handling the honors.
This peculiar need for resonance likely stems from growing up in a newsroom. There, with the police radio blasting, the ping, ping, ping of the Associated Press wire, television news drumming in the background, phones ringing, people yelling, editors reminding you deadline passed 10 minutes ago, the clacking and dinging of a score of typewriters (replaced now by loud swearing at computers when they fail to compute) you either learn to write with constant noise or quickly seek another profession.
The noise enveloping a newsroom, if you’ll permit some nostalgia, was the grandest sound ever created (we’ll get around to the total newsroom environment, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced, at a later time.) It’s pretty much gone with the wind now and society is poorer for it. Regardless, we type on, and the sound of music certainly compensates for the loss.
The great Duke Ellington once said there’s only two kinds of music – good and bad. My listening preference tends toward the classical. I have a jerry-rigged system that can barely be called a stereo – a Panasonic portable CD player hooked to a couple of tinny speakers. It ain’t a direct line to La Scala, but it works.
I’m writing this on Christmas Day and it occurs to me that music, and the beauty it can bring, is more important than ever. There’s a nagging, sinking feeling that America, and the promise that it once offered, has entered its twilight stage. The country, it seems, is enveloped in an ugliness that it simply can’t escape for the foreseeable future. A substantial measure of the population feels helpless in their desire to seek a course change and are seeking a way to cope with the loss of integrity in the country they live in and love. Music is constant and eternal.
May I suggest Brahms, Dvorak, Cesar Frank’s Sonata in A, Schubert’s Great Symphony and, literally, thousands of other pieces that might just provide not only inspiration but hope and solace.
Now, to be honest, there are other subjects I hold in high regard with music in order to survive. Norman Maclean, in his wonderful book, A River Runs Through It, wrote in summing up his life and recollections of flyfishing, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.’’
In my case a line drive double in the alley runs through it. I’ve been baseball mad since watching the Los Angeles Dodgers play the Chicago White Sox in the 1959 World Series on a 12-inch, black-and-white Philco.
But it’s winter and, unlike baseball, music knows no seasons, unless you’re talking about Vivaldi, who wrote about all four of them. While the Hot Stove League provides some relief in December and January with spring training waiting in the February wings, this off-season has proved unsettling with my beloved New York Mets disposing of some major players with little promise of replacing them with those of similar talents, thus providing anything but hope for a long-suffering Mets fan.
But music, at least the classical kind I prefer, endures, through bad times and good, through great events and great tragedies (I enjoy opera but prefer to see it performed). Much of it, like great art, stretches over the centuries. Folks hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Vienna in 1824 can hear it today, not only in streaming, an LP or CD, but live, as I did several years ago in Cincinnati during the May Festival.
It shows that beauty can persevere over time, display a striving toward perfection, even though it can never be achieved. Despite the too often overtaking ugliness, it offers comfort and stimulation in these difficult times, It’s something to hang on to.
For what it’s worth, I have become particularly fond of chamber music, While symphonies and concertos represent great achievement – it’s hard to better Brahms’ Violin Concerto – chamber pieces seem more grounded and more intricate as the individual musicians play off of one another. It is absorbing and, upon listening, can carry you to great places.
Now, permit me one, non-classical plug:
Bill Evans.
I should note that Evans and I have a very, very small but significant connection – we were both born and raised in Plainfield, N.J. (a town that also produced the incomparable George Clinton, the head of Parliament/Funkadelic, music that also merits attention). But that’s not the reason I’m touting him.
The man is overwhelming.
Jazz doesn’t carry the stature it once did. But suffice to say when you talk about the greatest jazz pianist, Bill Evans, who admired the likes of Bartok, Berg and Stravinsky, is always at out near the top. His playing differs from most others, less zing, perhaps, but more fire, more thoughtfulness than pyrotechnics.
Evans was the pianist on The Miles Davis epic Kind of Blue and his album with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, is frequently cited as the greatest of all live albums.
Suffice to say Bill Evans will carry you away from the current and seemingly unending tumult.
In these times we all need to do what it takes to get by. It takes music to transport you elsewhere.
To sum up, and make it even more nerdy, remember it was Shakespeare who said, “If music be the food of love, play on.’’
Indeed.