So… Classical music… What the hell happened?
Where did the 500 years of musical imagination predating pop music vanish off to?
It’s funny how little people think about, remember or care for classical music these days. I think most would find it hard to name or recall a single classical piece. Beethoven… Which one was he? He was the deaf one, right? No he was the one that went crazy…?
I’ll help you out… All of them went crazy, Beethoven was the deaf one… And this is Bach…
Classical music isn’t as complex or dated as it seems to be. Just because the men (and they were mostly men) are only known through oil paintings and handwritten letters doesn’t mean they are not still relevant.
Classical music is simply music and as music it will always be relevant. So long as there is emotion and beauty in the sound than nothing else matters.
Currently there is too much hype in music. Too much money. For example…
Puff Daddy, Sean Combs, Sean “Puffy” Combs, Diddy
…I mean, his pour is amazing… But…
Music should always be about the moment; The sound; The emotional impact. If vibration is the electrical current of the universe than it is true… Music moves us. It puts us in motion.
Emotion.
If all the supernatural, metaphysical power of music proves to be true than what does that mean about the centuries of music that preceded ours?
What does it say about our classical composers?
They were brilliant.
They constructed worlds and stories told entirely through sound. The voices in their head would not be silenced and what they created was remarkable.
These composers tortured themselves, literally, just to communicate a message written in sound yet we barely remember them.
The Superheroes
Mozart
Liszt
Brahms
The best storytellers the world ever knew.
Storytellers in sound.
It’s easy to forget about the hundreds of compositions and composers that existed prior to Frank Sinatra. Lost in the following decades of money and a billion dollar music industry…
But, there is a place for instrumental music, symphonic music and opera in this day and age. Classical music does not have to only exist in Universities and overpriced concert halls.
It was never intended for that audience.
Meet Modest Mussorgsky…
- Mussorgsky
Does he look like he gives a shit about anything?… This man composed Pictures at an Exhibition and was one of the most influential composers in Russian history. He was savage, self-taught and blackout drunk almost all the time.
The violinist Paganini thought he was the devil.
Liszt slept with everyone’s girlfriend.
And the rest died of syphilis or something worse.
Paganini
These weren’t light-hearted people. These composers were filled with fire, intensity and passion.
As we move towards the future we must take what we know about music structure and the composers that lived before us and push music further. There is no better way than to learn from the past… So… once in a while…
Put on a classical recording.
And while you do…
Remember that somebody living hundreds of years ago had a musical thought so powerful they were compelled to grab the nearest feather pen and wet ink and spend years out of their life to write down this composition so that one day, hundreds of years later, it could be performed solely for you…
…It’s trippy to think about…
-B
