Music of the sort that I mostly listen to comes out of a music box rather than out of actual musical instruments played by actual musicians at a concert, or, if you are really grand, by people in your living room or even by your brilliant self in your living room. Treating classical music as musical wallpaper is considered by many classical music lovers to be immoral, but I can't be bothered with that attitude. I do love Great Music, but I also love the sound it makes, so I frequently have it on in the background.
Often whole movements of Great Music will go by without me paying them any attention whatsoever, but about once a month, very approximately, something extraordinary happens. A piece of music leaps out of my music box and compels me to pay attention to it. I stop whatever I'm doing and either switch it off and resume my work, because I can't take the interruption, or else I continue the interruption to whatever I was doing and really pay attention. I never know when this will happen and thus when a decision, listen or don't listen, will have to be made.
The most recent occurrence of this sort was when Alfred Brendel's most recent recording of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto forced itself upon me. (This recording is part of a complete set of all the Beethoven piano concertos.)
This piano concerto is a high spirited piece written by the young Beethoven for him to show off his talents as a pianist. It is full of the joy of life, and I'm sure than one of the reasons it grabbed me was that at the moment when I had thoughtlessly put it on (because of liking the sound that it makes), I myself had just been seriously cheered up (by some nice blog comments, as it happens), so the music matched my mood. And I found everything about the music and the way it was played wholly delightful.
Brendel is nearing retirement and maybe he finds it hard to believe that everyone will stay interested in the music he still plays, perhaps because he himself now knows it so well. Whatever the reason, he now often highlights phrases in a rather schoolmasterish fashion, in a way which I sometimes find tiresome. A recent Mozart piano concerto recording of his with Mackerras is, for me, rather spoilt by this kind of thing. The tempo gets yanked about from bar to bar. Hardly a phrase goes by without Brendel having something fascinating to say about it, so to speak, but all this in music which, if simply played well and in time is a slice of heaven. It's like being fussed over by a waiter in the world's best restaurant.
And he did the same in the Beethoven, egged on by conductor Simon Rattle, who is a similarly didactic sort of musician.
And I loved every single second of it. Every inflection, every nuance, even little dig in the ribs or eager little emphasis or thoughtful slowing up, either from Beethoven or from Brendel or from Rattle, seemed to me to be totally perfect, and perfectly suited to the music.
I never know when this sort of this will happen. The most vivid memory I have of such a musical interruption was when I had Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra's Erato recording of Tchaikovsky's Pathethique Symphony on my headphones. Now you may think that it would be hard to ignore something like that, but my powers of indifference are formidable, and I am capable of actually sleeping with my headphones on and blaring. But not, it so happens, on that occasion. Then, I found myself listening. Soon, tears were streaming pathetically down my face, and I was Tchaikovsky's temporary slave.
The usual attitude towards classical music is that one ought to "make an effort", "put something into it", and so forth. But I treat it the way an eighteenth century aristocrat treated his servants. The burden of grabbing my attention is entirely on the shoulders of the music. If it does not impinge upon me, so much the worse for it.
What the modern electronic music box has done is to reverse the power relationship between classical music and its audience, that was established, I believe, in its modern concert-audience-equals-silent-congregation form by a nineteenth century conductor by the name of Richard Wagner. He it was who established the modern practice of dimming the lights in the opera house. Until then, it was up to the performers to impose themselves upon their audience, like a stand-up comic now.
Now, the gramophone and its successors has turned all that upside down yet again. Yes yes, thank you Mr Mozart! That will be all. Too many notes. So click, off with it. I am the master now.
Except that sometimes the music rises up from its Dead White grave and demands my attention.
I find these experiences deeply satisfying. I don't like the idea of paying attention to great art out of mere duty. How would I ever truly know that I liked it?
