Your mileage may vary, but repeated, active listening is the best way to participate with classical music. By surfing your own internal, emotional journey, does this music, punctuated by silence, lead to deep spiritual fulfillment and occasional epiphany. This is why home and car listening are as valuable as LIVE concerts. We can then sing, dance and even conduct the music in private as we learn its powerful yet beneath-the-surface beats. The industry may someday facilitate the tremendous potential of free-form listening at the concert hall too; providing floor space in the back for audience to respectfully stand, step or move about. (Think of the famous Proms concerts in London.)
That’s where CutTime® and the Classical Revolution Detroit series come in. You are encouraged to externalize music at many of our events. Wanna ride the magic carpet? Crank this track and stand up!
You Deserve It All!
With the amazing variety of music available today— whether live concert or thru media, there are more virtuosos and amazing styles to discover than we have time yet to live. We can surf radio, streaming, iTunes and YouTube that friends constantly post. And we check out bands at clubs, major shows at huge ampitheaters or stadiums, meet up with friends, drink, dance and chill to DJs with a thumpin’ bass & drums that make our clothes buzz. Life becomes a constant string of parties around music. And yet, at some point we’re ready for some real contrast; something that goes deep, something wise, something ancient.
Around 1650 Baroque music began to solidify into a full body of extended instrumental forms: what we can sonata. Next, the wild musical poetry of Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi and JS Bach, added by new instruments and technology, became musical short stories. The next generations, with CPE Bach, Haydn, Hummel and Mozart, pushed limits further into the first classical symphonies. Written music began to connect diverse styles, based on a musical devices and modes from opera, folk music and exotic cultures. There came to be few wrong interpretations of this music, because the experience is extra-personal.
An yet, there’s little harm in describing personal theories about music we know so well.
We might start by suggesting that a classical concert only demands the same skillset as watching a movie; except that without lyrics or a character making the plot and drama apparent, it’s up to us to imagine or discover the story. It helps tremendously to close our eyes, esp. since, seated should-to-shoulder with strangers, there’s nothing to do BUT breathe and focus on the music. In this way, listening becomes an act of meditation. Resist the temptation to focus on the strangeness of the situation: instrumentalists are trained to AVOID distracting you with emotive faces, gestures, dancing or calling out. (CutTime is different in this regard btw.)
Hints.
Again, it’s easier to focus on sounds with our eyes closed. But also, tapping or conducting a finger discretely against our leg covered by your other hand, let’s us keep the beat and follow along without distracting others. Imagine moving so slightly that no one can tell you are moving at all. Just barely activating the muscles, without letting them move us, let us dance classical music, even in our seats. How might Bugs Bunny or Michael Jackson animate or dance your favorite classical?
If CutTime can bring classical to your house for you to show how well you know it and love it, we might also someday bring this kind of participation to orchestra concerts. You might help us pioneer the classical revolution!
We fall in love with this music simply by bringing the same observation skills we bring to any movie, play, TV or music video. Taken as fantasy, a symphony (sonata for orchestra) become a virtual surfboard for riding the dramatic tension-release waves of instrumental music. The composer’s intended meaning becomes moot as we make their music our own. The most compelling stories are the ones we tell ourselves anyway. Our minds go to work, piecing together actions, meanings and outcomes from musical language. Once we can distinguish familiar themes, the actions and pictures might be vague at first, but slowly become solid with each listen. The whole picture comes into focus by keeping the pieces in mind.
You Want That in Writing?
Check out this 1810 review by E.T.A. Hoffmann about Beethoven’s 5th Symphony:
Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night, and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying within us all feeling but the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. . . . Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain.
These literary images can help us to listen deeper, pick up new patterns, find words to explain our joy, and to imagine more. Writing ourselves about music help us reflect further. Sometimes we might even come up with lyrics to major themes, even ones that don’t make sense. Speculation is its own reward, even if we keep it to ourselves. In fact, it’s a relationship we maintain privately with the music.
Don’t Want to Work That Hard?
All this doesn’t mean newcomers can’t enjoy classical on a surface level (visceral) or even as background. Music is so directly wired to our brains that there are times we want to just jump out of our seats. This makes sitting still in a hall very difficult— even unnatural. Musicians today are just starting to also enjoy sharing classical with you and your friends in clubs and restaurants, where you CAN move and call out freely. It just won’t be as vivid without the silence, but this is how classical music was presented in the 19th-Century.
Classical music is all natural, analog music— recorded as it were on a printed page so that musicians and the audience can borrow the composer’s genius long after they’re gone. It is beauty and horror, comfort and something else, motivation and meaning meant for a hungry public. What is enduring in the fine arts 
now belongs to us ALL! The real hook occurs when good musicians (interpreters) bring the printed page to full relief, with exaggerated character, shape, timing, great power (hard and soft) and flying fingers.
Classical music is a powerful tool; a language that can model metaphorical conflict and their possible resolution. CutTime and Classical Revolution Detroit are hot to share key information to accessing this tool with everyone. Thanks to foundations, generous donors and partners, we could bring this near you very soon.
The big hook for musicians is the endless ways that we find to make this music our own. We borrow the genius of Schubert— wear it, in fact, like some magical overcoat— and strut around in it for awhile. And in a series of waves, we whip it up to a sexy climax that surprises even ourselves! While the harmonies and rhythms that drive it stay the same, we play with a variety of attacks, energies, time-cheats and dynamics.
The various styles of classical mean that sonatas (written instrumental music) can be as powerful as songs; but only when it’s made fresh by great playing. CutTime wants to pull you into the center of this music— adding context, demos, activities and laughs. Join us!
- Read Wikipedia’s simple English page on Classical Music.
- Discover more insights here.