Saturday, May 12, 2012

Get me to the symphony orchestra on time

I don't purport to be any kind of musical genius. For most of my young life my library consisted of movie soundtracks and the debut CDs of popstars like Hilary Duff and Aaron Carter. By the time I was 12, I could recite the entire Green Day catalog at the drop of a hat. At 13, I renewed my interest in Broadway theater and became obsessed with all things Wicked. But throughout my many stages of musical fandom, I've never considered myself incredibly knowledgeable.

There was a time when I was just starting to become interested in Green Day that I decided I needed to become more music literate. I started watching MTV on a daily basis. This was back when TRL was still on the channel and there was no Jersey Shore, so for all intents and purposes it was still Music Television. I would watch the Top 20 Countdown on VH1 and within my DISH channel listing were, along with MTV and VH1, MTV2 and FUSE.

At one point, I remember becoming so intensely interested in music television that, while on vacation at my uncle's house in New Jersey, I planned to tape several hours of Green Day-related programming on FUSE. The family refused to let me record the shows since we were hosting a get-together that day and needed access to the television to watch some sporting event - was it football, baseball, golf? Either way, I wasn't convinced. I ended up pouting the rest of the day and still consider it one of the moments I felt most alienated from my family, however trivial it was.

But those little insights and obsessions with music television barely scratch the surface of the world encyclopedia of musical interest. I find it interesting, in fact, how so many people label themselves as knowledgeable in music when there are so many genres and subgenres that they know nothing of. For someone who enjoys theater or film, there is a similar effect, but to a lesser extent. The continuum of musical knowledge is so expansive that even those who spend all their time listening to the radio in one ear and iTunes on the other while reading Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and checking out the Billboard Top 100 will never quite understand it at full capacity.

So even though I've becoming pretty well-versed in '90s pop, '60s rock n' roll, early '00s whatever-you'd-call-it and decades of musical theater, I would never suggest that I know anything about music. In fact, I usually feel like I know nothing.

And there's one genre in particular that, despite my inherent interest in becoming knowledgeable about it, I believe I will never fully comprehend or be able to list as well as I can the Green Day discography. What genre is it, you ask? Classical music.

My best friend Tori is an Opera and classical music fanatic. When we were in sixth grade together, you could often catch her singing "Queen of the Night Aria" from The Magic Flute. I always marveled at her knowledge of all things classical and operatic, especially because the most I knew about the subject came from the episode "What's Opera, Arnold?" from Hey Arnold.

In my first few years of knowing her, Tori refused to listen to anything except oldies, classical and the Star Wars movie soundtracks. Going over to her house meant playing The Beach Boys or "The Imperial March" over the housewide speaker system. It was ridiculous, but it was fun. And though I could connect with her on a movie theme and ancient boy band level, the one thing I never got was why she liked those pieces of music that were written without any lyrics.

After a few years, I started to understand a bit more. I began listening to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, classical music that was palatable for untrained ears. The music was nostalgic, and that was the only reason I was able to understand it.

So I tried to branch out more. I listened to Debussy and Chopin, a little bit of Beethoven and Mozart. And while I became interest in their music, I just couldn't connect with it as well as I'd have liked.

Music has to be an emotional experience for me to actively listen to it. The times in the past when I have latched onto a particular genre or act, my reasoning has been solely because I can't help doing so. If I feel a connection to the music, I want to keep listening. That's why the Tchaikovsky and the Prokofiev made sense to me - it was a nostalgic connection. But as for the other classical music, it just never made me "feel."

I hate that this seems to be an inalienable trait from my person. Try as I might to become more interested in operas, symphonies, ballet scores, etc., my endorphins work against me.

The CSO looks like a still from an episode of Madeline.
Tonight I'm going to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with a few friends. It's a free excursion, paid for by the Residential College Board at my school. But the reason I decided to sign on to go wasn't because I felt any particular excitement at the prospect. It was because I thought that maybe exposing myself to classical music again might finally teach me why I should love it.

Is it worth it, though, to try and force yourself into understanding why something is objectively good? So much of music is a subjective experience. We listen and we feel something and that's why we like it. If we don't feel anything, we can't say we do. Unlike movies and theater and television, we can't experience music as a detached spectator. For those that can, I question the authenticity of their appreciation of music in the first place.

Much of my life as a fan of music has been spent trying to defend my tastes. When I was in elementary school, I had to make up excuses for why I liked *NSync versus the Backstreet Boys or Britney Spears versus Christina Aguilera. In middle school I had to defend my interest in Green Day to those who thought they were poseurs. In high school I could only tell my close friends about my love for musical theater because everyone else was busy listening to whatever was playing repeatedly on Top 40 radio. And in college my interests in all of these genres - having come together to inform my present musical taste - have been a source of constant questioning, a reason for my acquaintances and even my friends to assume I have little discernment of taste in the first place.

It's made me question my own taste to the extent of my now assuming it is necessary to surround myself with classical music, at least for one night, to try and add that to my internal music library.

However unimportant it may be to appeal to others in your musical tastes - since, as I said, it's a subjective trade and anyone who assumes otherwise is fooling themselves through pretension - it's hard to escape that nagging feeling that you need to be more musically intelligent.

That's what I'm doing, I guess. But it's also for me, I hope.

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