I was listening to some of my Mozart this morning. I had forgotten that a CD I don’t listen to very often had Mozart’s variations on this theme, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, which I found very enjoyable. Like many of you (if anyone is reading this), I had heard somewhere or other that he wrote the theme at an early age, but that appears not to be the case. It is a traditional French melody of unknown provenance, on the theme of which he wrote what sound like jazz-ish improvisations, Koechel 265.
Being me, this led naturally to thinking about Anne Frank’s father in a concentration camp in WW2. I own a documentary on her and her family, and unless my memory is seriously flawed, he spoke of how he and his fellow inmates used to try and recollect melodies by Beethoven, and Brahms and other “classical” composers. I thought about what adult Americans, in similar circumstances, would think about. What beauty could they muster to counter such ugliness? What hymns do we truly own within us? What myths that will sustain us? Only the religious would have a chance at accessing such comforts, in my view. Our culture is so shady, and so fallen. Certainly, obviously, there are positives, but are they the ambient “temperature”?
It seems not.
Edit: I got interrupted before I thought this through. As with all my posts, I may not agree with it tomorrow, and may well be disputing myself an hour from now. This is my “thinking out loud blog”, and that’s the way it works. Some stupidity is inevitable.
I don’t want to leave the impression I think Classical music–the music of the European courts in the time of its composition, and in general of well-to-do elites (who goes to the Orchestra?) today–is somehow the acme of human culture. I don’t believe that. In point of fact, I mainly listen to country music.
What I am trying to express here, poorly, it seems, is a sense that what ties us together is not as sturdy as it once was. The common references seem qualitatively less rich.
This may not be true, but I keep getting in my mind swapping quotes with people from Animal House or Airplane.
Again, things to do. I will likely be back on this post after a while.
Edit two: the concept of a “harmonic” appeared to me. What I think I may decide to use this word for is a sense that feeling tones which connect us can respond, like a tuning fork, to certain notes, certain qualitative gestalts.
In America, we talk about movie dialogue with one another, and what was on TV, and sports. If you find, say, a fellow Alabama or Auburn fan, you have an instant connection, a harmonic.
What I am looking at is a chaotic system, like a galaxy spread across the horizon, which responds with visible order the moment the right note has struck. Any system which does not have harmonics is disordered, and the closer the harmonics get to the fundamentals of the human experience–birth, death, pain, love, tragedy, comedy, absurdity, meaning–the better they are.
When I listen to great classical music, it evokes deep feelings in me sometimes; at other times, I am pleased in a somewhat cerebral way by the order which has been created. It massages some part of me that needs massaging.
Country music is meant to evoke recognition: you have been in that situation, you know what he or she is talking about.
Music which does not do that, which talks about getting laid, or the feeling of power over other human beings, or superficial sybaritic pleasures, would tend to evoke, it seems to me, very superficial connections. You sound the note, and the response is dim, blurry, foggy, indistinct when it comes to deep human realities.
I don’t do this in a morbid way, but I think about death every day. I live my life in response to my understanding of the meaning of death. As I see it, that is the most sound general orientation possible. Of course I fear death, but I think of it analytically. I don’t think death is the end. I think I will see, there, what I have done here. Some of it will disgust and dishearten me, but I like to think some of it will look I did the right thing after all.
What happens to people whose only thoughts of death come to them in horror movies, who have no ability to contextualize and transcend it? It seems to me that the images of death multiply precisely to the extent the capacity to process them, to abreact them into life energy, declines.
You get more and more death, and less and less life. It is like trying to end hunger by eating cardboard. All of us are in the same boat, floating to the same destination; but we are increasingly alone in that boat. This is the outcome of unintelligent, superficial cultural strategies, most notably those of the intelligensia. They have been destroying without creating for well over a hundred years. Utopia is always in the future, and always coming to us, not us going to it. This is lunacy.
I think that will do for this post.