Beethoven still has plenty of life in him

On the 3rd Symphony, the Eroica

One thing I’ve never understood is why liberal professors, literary critics, writers, etc are so pessimistic about the future of the humanities. I pointed out earlier Stephen Greenblatt’s demented response to declining enrollments in English departments. But I see it constantly: a sense that high culture is simply doomed. During my MFA, one prominent writer—thrice a finalist for a Pulitzer—told me she wasn’t even sure there would be books in thirty years. People act like we’re living in Brave New World and everyone is out doing orgy-porgies and eating soma instead of reading Shakespeare.

In music, the situation is just as bad—there are so many articles about how classical music is dying—symphonies and operas closing, music festivals ending, the listening population aging.

But for the last month I’ve spent about an hour each morning listening to classical music, and I’ve got to say…I don’t see how it can ever truly die. We will always have these recordings. And they will always have power. Just today I sat in the car listening to the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 3rd symphony, where short, choppy notes suddenly get elongated, so we hear the same theme, but transmuted, becoming more mournful, and then we hear the two modes intermix, so the playful, sly music becomes powerful and heroic, then slides back into slyness.

It’s like nothing else I’ve ever heard! Why would this music ever die out? Just seems absurd.

In fact, listening to classical music has been such an emotional experience that I’m confused why I didn’t do it sooner. My wife is hugely into this music. Saying she is into it is almost an understatement. Both her parents are musicians, and this music is her life. I tried to get into it seven years ago, but bounced off it. Just didn’t feel anything. Twelve years ago I also tried to listen to classical music—as I recall I listened to a lot of Debussy—but again nothing really happened.

Attention has something to do with it. I’ve been playing the fourth movement as I write this blog post, and it’s mostly just background music—could be muzak, elevator music. But when I pause to really listen, I’m like oh yes, there are the feelings. This is music you really can’t multi-task too. And it’s music that doesn’t necessarily grab you by the labels and pull you in, against your will, forcing you to pay attention. At least that’s not the case for me, at the volume I’m playing it.

The hardest part about listening was indeed finding the attention for it. I have a fairly good attention span, I suppose. I can concentrate on a book for hours at a time, with only occasional phone interludes. I can read Kant and make some sense out of it. But listening to classical music is a new level of attention. I have to eschew all phone and even any mental wandering.

At the same time, it’s not like I am concentrating deeply on the music. I am simply giving it my attention—no more or less attention than I’d give to my daughter if she was talking to me, for instance. It’s not like meditating, where you try and hold a moment of stillness. Classical music is inherently fairly stimulating, and it’s not difficult to allow it to hold my attention. There is some wool-gathering, of course, where I wonder about this or that (often I’m wondering how I am going to write up this experience as a blog post), but it’s not too hard to get myself sorted out and pointed back in the right direction.

My attention span has improved over this month of listening, and if I was a different sort of person I’d give a self-help spin to this post. I locked up some of my electronics, including my Nintendo, in my storage space. I rejiggered the notifications on my phone so that I only get alerts when my wife texts—everyone else has to wait for me to open the messaging or email app. But I am still not a god of present-mindedness. I have to do copy edits on my literary novel today. I hate copy edits. It’s my least favorite part of publishing a book. So I am procrastinating by writing this post.

It’s certainly a problem with high culture. If some things are inherently better than other things, why don’t all people like the better things? The pleasure I get from classical music is, surprisingly, somewhat in excess, both in variety and raw intensity, from what I get from popular music, and it seems like most people would want to feel this pleasure. In fact, the pleasure is so intense and readily accessible that it makes movies, television, and books seem rather paltry. As Walter Pater said, “All arts aspire to the condition of music.” With music, there is some kind of direct access to the soul, without any intellectual mediation.

I suppose people have told me that it was possible to have profound emotional experiences while listening to classical music, but I don’t think I’d really believed them. Or I’d assumed that you needed to be a musician to feel those things. But I was wrong—the pleasure is relatively close to the surface! It’s pretty astonishing.

My newfound interest in attention has led me to a few pop non-fiction books about how our phones are hacking our attention. The best of them was Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which is fabulously entertaining. It’s a mixture, Malcolm Gladwell style, of the author’s attempt to do a digital detox in Provincetown, interspersed with his talks to behavioral researchers. With their help he goes through ten systemic issues that might be affecting our attention these days—everything from childhood trauma to air pollution to, of course, our cell phones.

I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure to what extent I bought the premise. Like I said, there are distractions, but I can still read, I can still write. Surely reading and writing were never easy activities? Surely they always required effort? Still, there is definitely a story to be told here about how listening to classical music gave me the added focus I needed to quit playing Nintendo and going on Twitter (I haven’t been on in three weeks, because peoples’ Israel / Palestine takes are so horrendous).

I’ve been struggling for the past few weeks with how exactly to write about classical music, because my bias is that content matters. The goodness of a thing is inextricable from its content. And I do feel very strongly that classical music does have content, but of course when there’s no words, the content is very elusive. But what I like about Beethoven’s 3rd is that sense I get of the ideal, of the heroic.

It was only today that I googled the symphony and found out that its name “Eroica” literally means “Heroic”. It’s the heroic symphony. Originally it was going to be dedicated to Napoleon, but Beethoven got mad that he named himself Emperor and crossed out Napoleon’s name, saying the symphony was now named “in memory of” a great man (who is now gone, it is implied).

It’s odd how most novels and movies and songs and epics are about heroes, and yet view seem quite as heroic as the third symphony. I just finished listening to Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and while it was clever and inventive, it wasn’t heroic—the knights seemed to go around being knights because they happened to be knights. And that’s true for most superhero movies too—the heroes are heroes because they are supposed to be heroes.

But to me, in modern times, the heroic is about one person facing down society. I tried recently to watch a few movies about heroes: To Kill A Mockingbird, High Noon, On The Waterfront. These all had the basic formula down: person with a lot to lose, who isn’t guaranteed a win, but stands up to society anyway. I’m not sure why more movies and books and TV shows don’t do that! In most media, it really feels like the deck is stacked in the hero’s favor.

I think the Eroica digs past the mechanics of plot, and it gets to the essence of what it means to stand alone. You’re just this tiny theme, very choppy and fast, and you’re contending with these other very dark, loud instruments.

There’s a darkness to the piece too. It’s no wonder, I think, that the bad guy in Clockwork Orange loved Beethoven so much. In his work, with its celebration of the individual, it’s easy to read Alex’s own sense of himself as someone superior to the rest of society—a predator amongst prey.

Sometimes I wonder what it is I’m doing. I’ve given up on the idea that I’ll ever be a famous writer. Sometimes I’m not even sure if I’ll ever or have ever written a worthwhile book. So why bother listening to this music, reading these books, writing this blog?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the one in the courtroom, yelling “No, you’re out of order!” I wanted to be that steamship in War of the Worlds that rams an alien, killing it, so the refugees can flee safely. I’m not sure how those energies got pulled into the art world. I think that I’m inherently bookish and antisocial and, honestly, just hate responsibility. And art has a heroic quality. Artists go against society. They disrupt established order and upset the status quo.

Sometimes I feel very tempted to make my Great Books / high culture stuff into a grand cause. Like I’m Horatius on the Bridge, holding back the hordes that want to destroy Great Art. Or, no, I’m Gandalf the Grey, telling the Balrog, “You shall not pass” and being sucked down into the depths of Moria by his flaming tentacles.

And I don’t think that’s totally wrong. With all this high culture stuff, I have found something that I can believe in wholeheartedly, in a way that most of its traditional proponents don’t seem to be able to. That’s one reason why I’m not hesitant to write about classical music, even though I obviously know nothing about it. The reason I write is because I can offer something that trained writers on the subject can’t, which is genuine lay enthusiasm and a genuine belief that this music is good and is better than the songs on the Billboard 100.

There’s a kind of irony here, which is that a worship of the image and the posture of heroism can ultimately lead you, as it did Beethoven, to worship a figure like Napoleon: sterile, callous, and self-aggrandizing—a man who was heroic, but mostly in service to his own ambition. Ultimately, a real hero needs a cause that they can believe in, but in possessing a cause, they reduce their own stature, subordinating themselves to someone or something else. Only a few heroes have transcended this dichotomy and achieved the effect of aggrandizing themselves without seeming to purposefully seek it (Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are the most notable examples here). To say that Gandhi sought the spotlight would be true, but also incomplete. He believed so completely in his own rightness—in the worth of satyagraha and ahimsa—that he and the cause were the same thing. Anything he did for the cause redounded to himself, and vice versa.

But Gandhi was the man of the hour—his beliefs put him sharply in conflict with authority in a way that was guaranteed to magnify his own importance. A Gandhian in Nazi Germany would’ve been killed instantly. A Gandhian in contemporary India (and there are still some!) is just a buzzing bee.

For my part, I have things that I believe in, but they don’t really bring me into conflict with anything. It would be foolish in the extreme to pretend that the culture is dedicated to tearing down classical music. It’s not. Millions of kids are learning right now how to play Beethoven. Dozens of professional orchestras are playing his repertoire. That’s not exactly something you can say about Taylor Swift, or even the Beatles. But I suppose my fate is to be given a very unheroic task—the slow and careful work of preservation, of upholding the old verities, and of confirming for another generation, that, yes, these old things can still be rebelled against. My role, I guess, is not to be the hero in the traditional story of art vs establishment, but to be the villain instead.

A huge Beethoven fan