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He was born/considering composers...
From the earliest days of this
website, whenever I would write about composers, I
always chose some interesting aspect of their
philosophy, their writings, some incident from their
lives, or some filter through which we might get a
glimpse of them as human beings. With Bach it was
something he said about organ playing; with Beethoven, a
study of different portraits and the question of image;
with Mozart a study of his earliest pieces and a look at
how musical logic works by way of a silly game he
invented; with Erik Satie, his absurdist writings. This
was well before wikipedia and several author sources of
biographical information, but there were already plenty
of places you could go online to learn about when a
composer was born, when they died, and what they wrote
that was so important. I didn't see any point in
repeating the same thing you could find everywhere else.
I wanted my site to be different, not to ask what but to
ask why, and how, and get us to think a little about who
these people actually were and why it mattered.
So if you wanted to simply find out
when a composer was born, and when they died, you might
have to look somewhere else.
Somewhere along the way, the listening
catalog was born, and with it, over a hundred composers
were listed with their dates, which can make the page
look a little like a graveyard. Most of the composers
represented are dead, after all. And the rest will be...
Some of my teachers had warned me away
from beginning essays on persons with the ubiquitous
phrase "He was born" on the basis that it was a pretty
dull way to begin an essay. It doesn't exactly draw the
reader in and make them want to know what you have to
say. On the other hand, there are a lot of folks out
there who just want to know some basic facts about
composers, and these temporal boundaries for their lives
seem to be the coin of the realm. Many of us just want
to know stuff to pass a test, and simply facts like
these tended to dominate education when I was young and
maybe still do. It's easier to trade in things that not
only can be proven, but proven easily, regurgitated
quickly, graded just as fast.
One of my favorite authorial
travelling companions, the historian Will Durant (I've
read all 11 volumes of his Story of Civilization) will
not infrequently begin a discussion of a famous figure
with the phrase "he was born." I try not to think less
of him because of it: he has a huge story to tell,
plenty of space in which to tell it, and there are only
so many ways to begin to talk about someone. Also life
is short and who knows how many hours he would have
wasted trying to be clever all the time. So with a
journalist's efficiency, he simply started where most of
us do. Much of the time, anyway.
It isn't that that phrase, and the
information it represents isn't important. Many people,
however, may think it is not. Mozart was born in 1756.
Should I care? Why not just enjoy the music? What does
that year mean anyway?
And that, I think, is where it can get
interesting. Because a year in the story of humanity is
never just a year. What was happening in 1756? Who was
in charge of what and what were they fighting over? What
was the nature of the world into which the composer was
born and what shaped their thinking? You have to know a
bit of history in order for that number to come alive;
otherwise it is just a number.
Beethoven, for instance, was born in
1770. Anybody remember what happened in 1776? How about
1789? Two seismic shifts in the rule of nations. Two
stabs at democracy. Brahms was born in 1833. That would
have made him 15 in 1848. Any takers for why that might
have made an impact?
Suggesting that none of that could
have had anything to do with the man's music is a lazy
way out. It may seem to honor the integrity of music as
music, not wishing to adulterate it with political
events, particularly when the composer was writing a
symphony with no program as opposed to a symphony with a
year attached, as Shostakovich was once to do,
explicitly memorializing an uprising that had tragic
results. But it really ignores the larger picture and a
piece of music's place in it.
A year doesn't just mean politics. It
also means style, and fashion. It can tell you, before
you hear a note of the music, what kinds of music the
composer is likely to have written. Did he live during
the Classical period or the Romantic period? If so, does
his music sound like the standard ideas of his time or
was this person clearly swimming upstream? Were they
avant garde or reactionary? Was what they did really
unique or just utilitarian? You can figure that out for
yourself if you know the history of musical ideas.
Otherwise, you can read an essay in which some erudite
person tells you these things and you simply swallow
them and hope you will remember enough to get through
that essay question on the test. But you probably won't
own that information, because you bought it retail, and
maybe the sleeves don't fit. If you made it yourself, in
the furnace of connecting things to each other, that is
thinking, you would be far more likely to
remember it. Or not have to.
Here's a random example: The French
composer Claude Balbastre lived from 1721 to 1799. Isn't
that interesting? How did he manage that? Why didn't he
die earlier, say from sudden loss of a pretty important
part of his body? What was he doing during that time, I
wonder? He lived through some interesting times.
Obviously some other people did as well; it's not like
everybody died in the French Revolution. But he, it
turns out, could have been in more danger than most,
given his aristocratic background. And he survived. Does
that make him someone you want to get to know a little?
He was a person, with thoughts and
ideas, joys and fears. Maybe to us he is only a series
of sounds, pretty noises from a simpler time because it
isn't our time. Unless you get a glimpse into his world,
and suddenly, it's not so simple after all.
He was born....into a time and place
when life wasn't easy. And he managed to write music
that some of us are still listening to. Did it affect
the music he wrote? You'd better believe it.
Beethoven writing a heroic symphony
and dedicating it to a bringer of democracy who turned
out to be an authoritarian, Bach writing a huge Catholic
Mass in Protestant Germany, Mozart writing an opera in
which the servants get the better of the nobles, Brahms
writing a Requiem to a traditional, yet tradition
shattering text: these pieces would not exist
outside of the times in which they were written, or
without the personalities who wrote them. Even the
pieces that say merely Symphony no. 29 or Sonata in A
Major can't be taken completely out of context. Ever
heard of a Mannheim Rocket? It was all the rage at the
time when Mozart, wanting to make an impression, began
using the musical device in his music. Or the famous
Rondo alla Turca. Do you know about the mania for all
things Turkish in a Vienna that felt threatened by, and
soon would be at war with, the Turkish empire?
There are a lot more sources for
information like this now on the web than there were.
Often they come in the form of program notes to various
piece of music. They can make for some interesting
reading. But they aren't just glittering anecdotes. They
can make the composers and their music more real. Nobody
lives in a vacuum. Their lives are affected by the
circumstances in which they live. You were born. You
will die. That dash in between is about what you will
make of it, and what society will make of it, and what
the forces you can't control will make of it, and the
ones that you struggle against will make of it. What
your parents tried to make of you, and your teachers,
and your political leaders, and your friends and those
magazines and books you read and those thinkers and
those people your heard on the radio and online and on
television and those places you lived and the people you
just couldn't get along with. That's your life. And for
better or worse, at least it's interesting.
Wouldn't you think that the people who
wrote what you are listening to are at least that
interesting too?
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