Jordan M. M Schweigel wrote:

>I think that many people my age (16+) could get into CM more if they knew
>the live behind the music.  In this day in age the family has greatly
>deteriorated from what it used to be say 20 years ago, and many of my peers
>are placed in situations and environments which are horrible.  If they only
>knew the torment faced by Beethoven, Mahler, or Tchaikovsky (to name a few)
>and by listening to their music could hear the rage, anger, and torment of
>these composers' lives, I think that more of my peers would be turned on to
>classical music.

Assuming they are still capable of hearing the musical stylistic cues that
represented "rage, anger, and torment".  The music of Korn (to use your
example) is "transparent" to them, i.e., they don't have to use any sort
of stylistic "dictionary" to determine the meaning of the music.  The rage
in Mahler is expressed differently.  Maybe they first have to get over the
idea they are listening to a "symphony." One major difference (which I
think I mentioned in another post) is that Mahler requires you to follow a
sort of musical "argument" (in the meaning of a logico-dramatic discourse)
whereas Korn requires only that your adrenalin pump is in working order.

So rage and all the other emotions are as integrally tied to his overriding
structural and dramatic conceptions as the scent of an orange is embodied
in the fruit.  They don't just pop out randomly but are the inevitable
result of the musical developments that led up to them.  While I can think
of a few rock songs that have a sense of dramatic structure (The Who's
"Won't Get Fooled Again" and Clapton/Allman's (aka Derek and the Dominoes)
"Layla" are noble attempts at this), I can't think of any example in which
a logical developmental structure is carried out from start to finish.  The
20-30-minute or longer jams of the Dead and the Allman Brothers are about
as close as rock gets, and it is improvisation that predominates, rather
than motivic development within a large-scale structural framework.

I think it's lack of interest in following the thread of a symphonic
development, coupled with the idea that "classical" is not a context they
feel comfortable with, are the things that turn your colleagues off.

>And I think that if we look at the lives of many of the great composers,
>we find many situations that young people today can identify themselves
>with, and I think that if a person who is passionate and "real" about this
>music introduces this music to them, I think that many will be attracted
>and see the whole realm of classical music from a totally different
>perspective than they had before.

I agree that this could make some difference, but in your relating of music
to composers life you are perhaps committing the fallacy of thinking that
a composer's output mirrors the composer's life.  It may be a record of
what was on the mind of the composer at the moment, and that certainly is
affected by one's circumstances, but the artistic values that a composer
tries to embody in his/her work must go well beyond one's individual
circumstances.  And the individual's response to circumstances can vary.
Of two composers struggling with adversity, one may choose (maybe because
of the prevailing Zeitgeist) to express the feelings in as direct and raw
a manner possible, but another may react by composing music of unearthly
beauty, simply because he or she finds real life so intolerable.  Perhaps
music written during the holocaust would find examples of both and would be
fertile ground for study in that regard.

And what of Elliott Carter's music? Here is a man who apparently never
had money problems, and for all I know has lived a fairly serene life,
but his music must sound as if he's been through some horrific experiences,
at least to those unfamiliar with his style.  Is he a prisoner of a larger
Zeitgeist which dictates the manner in which he permits himself to express
feeling? Or shall we argue (as Stravinsky or his ghost writer in the
Poetics has done) that music doesn't exist to convey anything other than
its own ideal forms? (Edmund Gurney expressed a very similar notion in his
Power of Sound, way back in the last century, btw.--see also Hanslick's The
Beautiful in Music.)

In sum, I think the matter of become a "whole person aesthetically" is more
involved than knowing what a composer "went through" in order to compose,
although that may be a first step in attracting interest.  To that extent
I'd agree with you.  I'm certainly enjoying reading about Brahms now, but
it's different because I liked his music to start with.  You could argue
"And now you know WHY!" ;-)

Chris Bonds