Classical music.
Wait, don’t stop reading.
You may not remember what this type of music IS so let me help jog your memory… Our parents played classical cassettes for us on Sunday mornings instead of allowing us watch cartoons to instill a sense of beauty and culture into our budding lives at an impressionable age.
No?
It’s what our wildly underpaid elementary school music teachers tried in vain to have us learn and then tediously perform to an audience of irritated adults with better things to do on a Thursday evening. And, if you were lucky, you also tooted into a tan plastic recorder to (un)impress said adults with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In all fairness, our parent’s had every reason to be irritated.
Still Nothing?
That’s because it seems our generation has casually dismissed this required learning credit and replaced it with more contemporary clothing optional music. We’ve traded Bach for Bieber and Purcell for Perry. And I am not saying that it’s all wrong, I’m just wondering why we were so anxious to trade up to hip-hop or pop or country or anything with a base line and glitter? We look to our music to enhance a setting or perhaps to escape from reality and be transported elsewhere, but it appears recently that we simply want to be “transported” to the club or to a country road.
Why have most of us collectively decided to completely gloss over classical music, such a beautiful (and soulful) genre?
And don’t tell me that it is because all of the Masters are long gone. They aren’t. Our generation has produced some incredible classical composers, whom none of you have ever heard of, because you, like me, live in the mainstream, which I might argue is flowing down.
One such exceptional will-definitely-go-down-in-history contemporary classical composer, Eric Whitacre, is the new Artist in Residence for the Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Concert Hall, which happens to be right in your backyard. Don’t worry, I didn’t expect you to know that.
Los Angeles is a city more widely recognized for it’s plastic surgeons, housewives and EDM festivals than for it’s culturally rich and diverse classical music scene.
What’s sad is that it took me a solid decade of living in LA to find what I was looking for, and believe me, it wasn’t easy. Sure, KUSC is a preset station on my car’s radio, but I was never compelled to seek out the concerts they so breathlessly promoted on the station. My mistake.
I’ve always served the classical music deities. Somehow the efforts of my parents paid off and I’m one of 8 or 9 Angelenos under the age of 65 who will sit through multiple hours of traffic on the 10/405/5 to hear a single hour of sublime soul-crushingly beautiful music.
Last weekend I invited my girlfriend to join me for LA Master Chorale’s performance of Sonic Masterworks; a collection of ancient as well as contemporary extremely challenging works of classical music (feel free to read into that sentence).
The concert began with Lotti’s Crucifixus and was followed by Allegri’s Miserere. Both classics. From there we moved forward through centuries of music including one 14 minute composition by Abbie Betinis, directed by Whitacre, containing no words but simply sounds produced to evoke visions of the aurora borealis. The music was elevated and ethereal – meant to transport the listener to a place deeply spiritual. Then to lift the audience from their trance, Grant Gershon, the Artistic Director of the LA Master Chorale, threw in an actual spiritual by Moses Hogan and Eric Whitacre conducted his own arrangement of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” which was like a dreamlike drive down memory lane.
*Side note worth mentioning. At very end of Enjoy the Silence, a woman three seats over began to aggressively dig through her handbag. Packaging crinkled into what sounded like a microphone hidden beneath the cellophane nightmare that made up the contents of her purse. The choir was actually singing the world silence as this woman dug and dug through the wrappers so un-apologetically that audience members from across the hall looked over in our direction to shake their heads in disgust. We all, in fact, were shaking our heads. I silently prayed that one of the hall attendants would yank this woman out of her seat and escort her to her Oldsmobile.*
Overall the concert was eye-opening to say the least. As energetic as I feel after attending a show at Staples Center or the Hollywood Bowl, I left this particular evening buzzing with an energy that was slightly different. I felt whole and gratified.
As we shuffled slowly behind the crowd of 80 somethings toward the exit, we both agreed that the performance was somewhat like roaming the labyrinth halls of a modern art museum. We don’t always understand where the artist is going or what we are supposed to take away from the exhibit or individual pieces, but perhaps that’s not entirely the point. We go to experience something new and beautiful and unknown. Certain pieces of art or in this case music strike us in a way that we won’t, (or can’t) forget. Other pieces may certainly not be our cup of tea but arguably they are worth our time and consideration.
Classical music reminds us that we have a soul and it may speak a language that we haven’t exposed it to in a while, or ever. So broaden your horizons, open your mind and press play.