hey look, another long post…
i’m sitting here in my lovely apartment listening to mahler’s eighth symphony, the symphony of a thousand, it’s called. the piece is ridiculously amazing and just huge and beautiful and glorious…i sometimes forget how much “classical†music can move me. back in junior high/high school i was in a very good community, youth orchestra. it was so wonderful, because we got to play so many staples of the repertoire, including beethoven’s fifth, overture to the marriage of figaro, sibelius’ second symphony…the list goes on. i remember moments throughout performances that would just cause me to nearly start crying in the midst of sawing away on my violin. the beauty, the genius, the intimate portrait of a man’s soul…i can’t even describe it right. music is just too deep for idle words.
when i came to arkansas, i got play in an orchestra again after languishing in only wind ensembles for the previous five years. (i mean, there were some moments, but you really just can’t compare the two.) sweet majesty was i glad. i felt like i was playing meaningful music again, and where i belonged…in the violin section.
back in high school, i didn’t know jack about music, but i guess i had an intuition about it. i would listen to “classical” stuff here and there, but didn’t really know what i was listening to other than beauty. now, after 5 years of studying music, i know vastly more than i imagined there was to know, and there are still many, many, many things that i don’t know or understand completely. nowadays when i am listening to a piece, i often listen for specific things, like how the parts are interacting, try to follow the composer’s logic in going to where he goes…but it’s interesting how i’m still able to enjoy music. what i mean is, some people argue that learning too much about a subject (particularly music, it seems), causes a loss of enjoyment. not so for me, because i can choose to sit back and be absorbed with sound, ignoring any academic approach to hearing it, or i can attentively and actively study what’s happening in a piece. either way gives me great amounts of joy and the most superb feeling i know. i certainly love rock/folk/whatever, but there is something about the classical genre that moves me beyond those other styles. or maybe just in a different way.
the sheer amount of thought and design that goes into a classical composition is ridiculous. how do i know? i’m a composition major. so not only do i write “fine art†music, i study how pieces are put together to better understand what is happening and to further develop my skills (something i’m actually pretty terrible at doing). i just never fully realized how much hard work it took to complete a piece that was worth something. ya’ll just have no idea. it’s torturing, really. a composer named john corigliano (who is still living) said this about the composing process: “i hate composing. i love having composed.†i’m much the same way. the process is so long and arduous cause i want everything to be just right; i can’t accept mediocrity. beethoven was much the same. it’s encouraging to read that there are accomplished composers who feel the same way…which isn’t to say that i can even remotely place myself in the same league as them, because i shouldn’t even be talking about them in the same paragraph wherein i’m talking about myself as a composer.
i often just want to give up, especially when i go listen to someone like eric whitacre. his choral music just seems so far above what i could possibly accomplish. while it does discourage me, at the same time i am pressed to succeed, to surpass, to achieve greatness. i have this dream that i’ll actually break out of myself and produce something truly worthwhile someday.