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Playwright William Congreve said: "Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." And so it does. Perhaps the Russian revolutionary Lenin had Congreve in mind when he said, according to Maxim Gorky: “I know the ‘Appassionata’ inside out and yet I am willing to listen to it every day. It is wonderful, ethereal music. On hearing it I proudly, maybe somewhat naively, think: See! people are able to produce such marvels!” [He then winked, laughed, and added sadly]: “I’m often unable to listen to music, it gets on my nerves, I would like to stroke my fellow beings and whisper sweet nothings in their ears for being able to produce such beautiful things in spite of the abominable hell they are living.”
I used to listen to music everyday. When I began to teach, I met colleagues who knew about classical music. I knew very little then, not much more than the Strauss waltzes on some old 45rpm records we had at home when I was a boy. I was embarrassed by this, so I embarked upon a course of self-education. I read books about Beethoven and Mozart, and I began to buy records of classical music and tune in to the classical music radio station in Pittsburgh. The more I listened to the music, the better I liked it and the more I came to appreciate its beauty and grandeur. Within a few years, I had nearly five hundred record albums, mainly classical but also about one hundred jazz recordings. I liked the old jazz that another Pittsburgh radio station played, and I expanded out from this to more modern jazz music. Not only did I enjoy all this music, but now I could talk at least somewhat intelligently about it.
My music appreciation “course” took a leap forward when I began to take flute lessons. Every week I went to a local music store in downtown Johnstown (PA) for a one-hour lesson with Mr. Nick Gemas. Nick’s pupils were mostly grade-schoolers, and I always felt a bit strange following a kid .about four feet tall. But Nick was happy to talk to an adult. In between our exercises, he told me about his music career. He was trained as a violinist, but he hit the symphony job market just as the Great Depression struck. He needed work, so he learned to play a bunch of other instruments. He could play all of the woodwinds, and he found work as a jazz and popular musician, playing saxophone, clarinet, and flute. He got me excited about the flute, and before long, I bought a nice open-holed instrument to replace the store rental with which I had started. I practiced all the time, so much that my Sicilian landlady scolded me in her inimitable English. I was keeping her and her husband up at night. “Play inna daytime,” she implored.
I bought as much flute music I could find. I loved it all. Classical and jazz. Vivaldi, Bach, Haydn, Stamitz, Telemann, Rameau, Corrette, Geminiani, Handel, Mozart (who supposedly didn’t like the flute, but listen to his concerto for flute and harp and ask yourself how this could be true), Faure, Gluck, Briccialdi, Debussy, Poulenc; in jazz, Herbie Mann, Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Eric Dolphy, James Moody, Sam Most.
I had my favorites. One was Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Major for flute, called Il Cardellino (The Goldfinch). I listened to it a hundred times. I used headphones so I could hear when the flutist breathed. I learned to play the slow movement, but I left the brilliant first and third movements to Jean Pierre Rampal, Paula Robison, and James Galway. Humans no doubt made music to imitate sounds they heard in nature. Ancient men and women must have listened to birds and tried to imitate their sounds. A mockingbird or a canary can make delightful and complex music. But Vivaldi went the goldfinch one better in his concerto, with fantastic trills, runs, grace notes, and turns, all built into a structured whole that leaves the listener breathless. And the flutist too. Birds can’t do what Vivaldi did. And while Beethoven glorified and sometimes mimicked nature in his Symphony Number 6 ( the “Pastoral” Symphony), he did much more. He made a work of art, a great one. Another favorite flute piece was the Menuet from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne Suite No. 2. Here the melody, played slowly, is so beautiful that you really do want to “stroke [your] fellow beings.” If you want to see human musical inventiveness at work, listen to Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This is a set of twenty-four variations for piano and symphony orchestra. It is fun to listen to variations, to see if you can hold the theme in mind against the growing complexity of the variations. Keep count of Rachmaninoff’s variations and after seventeen, get ready to be amazed. Number eighteen is a famous and lovely melody, often played alone, and you wonder how it could be a variation on the theme. What the composer did was to invert the theme, that is, literally turn the notes upside down and change the key accordingly. How did he think to do this? He must have been surprised at the result. The wikipedia entry on this work quotes him as saying, “This one, is for my agent.”