ME AND THE CLASSICAL MUSIC - sudhanshu

ME AND THE CLASSICAL  MUSIC

I believed that music – all music – is a potential source of solace, connection and joy, and that ‘classical music’, so often reserved for a so-called ‘elite’, should be available to anyone who might want to listen to it. I realized that we were in the beginning of a seismic technological shift which could transform the way that people, of all different backgrounds and ages and cultures, could access the music that largely gets labelled ‘classical’. That was very exciting to me. Since then it has been the wonder of my life to see classical  music  find such an open-eared, big-hearted audience around the world. I have loved hearing from my readers – and listeners! – about how the classical music helped them on their own journeys through the sometimes vexing art of being human.

Now, I am writing this in an utterly transformed, post-2020 pandemic world. Over the past four  years I have witnessed – and personally experienced, on the most profound level – how music has offered particular consolation and companionship in these times of extreme grief, distress and isolation. Somehow even when things fall apart, music endures.

And so, although it might sound ridiculous, the platitudinous equivalent of sticking a Band-Aid over a brain hemorrhage, I still believe music is, above all else, a source of hope. Of radical, robust hope. I am given hope by the many stories I have seen of composers, aka normal people, who have been compelled to create something of beauty, of imagination, of meaning, of enquiry – even if they happen to be largely unsupported or uncelebrated in their efforts in their own times: cruelly disabled, or sidelined, or even worse, victims of abject prejudice. I am given hope by the idea, too, of such music generating a profound response in future listeners, maybe on the other side of the world or in altogether unrecognizable circumstances. I am given hope by the constancy and generosity of this human exchange, unfolding across space and time, so that perfect strangers are afforded a soundtrack to process big things, big emotions, in privacy, or possibly shared with their community, but in a way that has a real impact in their own lives. Most of all, I am given hope by the fact that humans have been doing this for so long – often facing even worse inequity or poverty or plague – and still it endures.

While in its written form music is just abstract dots on a page, once it is breathed alive by living, feeling humans, it connects the dots across time and space and geography and circumstance. Yes, the genre known as ‘classical music’ was largely born in Western Europe, in a largely Christian tradition, but it certainly hasn’t stayed there, and thank goodness! It’s like irrepressible laughter, or our ever-expanding universe: it can’t be contained.

There is about a millennium’s worth of classical music gathered here, as I hear this music. Many of the earliest composers that I have listened in Western Classical music , like Hildegard of Bingen or Pérotin, almost certainly composed their music ‘to the glory of God’. I obviously can’t be certain, but I believe those remarkably gifted eleventh-century humans were also trying to encapsulate and express their sense of wonder about just being here – which, by a process of extraordinary alchemy, gets transmuted, goes into the sound and the physical vibrations of their music and travels across time to markedly different cultures with markedly different belief systems (or none). So, for example, J. S. Bach, a very devout Lutheran who died many hundreds of years ago, is only ‘J. S. Bach’, the immortal legend, because his music contains something ineffable that resonates in other people, who then lovingly resurrect his music every moment of every day on every continent.

And the more I think about this endless continuum of human beings sharing, exchanging, depending upon music and each other, the more awed I am.

In this way, music is like a living laboratory – a never-ending stream of mutual endeavour that gets recorded and re-created by performers and audiences who interpret it for their individual sensibilities, proclivities and particular moments in time. When music ‘means’ something to us, whoever we are, we often bypass any intellectual questions and go directly to a physiological and emotional response. You know how it goes: sudden goosebumps; an involuntary tingle-factor; a feeling of the hair rising on the back of your neck. Something in that particular song or piece or performance has connected with you and your own set of experiences and thoughts, beliefs, traumas, tragedies, disappointments, secrets, regrets, joys. Almost before we are even aware of it, something has connected.

Academic study of classical music has its place, of course. But classical music, as it is actually heard and experienced by the vast majority of people, is all about these chance moments. It is not some fossilized relic, fenced off in a dusty museum or glittering concert hall. And entry to this thing called ‘classical music’ is not reserved only for those humans who profess to ‘understand’ it – who, by some mixture of luck or privilege or history, can both afford it and feel welcome at it. That fiction, no, worse, that de facto cultural segregation, that despicable ‘othering’, has no role in the world today.

And yet. I understand why so many people feel alienated or made to feel ignorant by the very term ‘classical music’ – and its presumed associated rituals – which cut across intersectional lines of wealth, education, race and class. For a long time, and in many cultures, music education has been sidelined at the expense of more ‘useful’ subjects or pursuits, pushing access to it into the hands of the privileged few who can and want to pay for it. The perception remains, therefore, that ‘classical music’ is only for posh, rich, white people, or at least that it is an esoteric monolithic museum piece with zero relevance to modern life.

But I am convinced (by my twenty-plus professional years of working with music, in many different guises and formats) that anyone can respond and be moved and even fall in love with classical music – without understanding ‘how’ it works on them. Because, spoiler alert: literally nobody knows! There is no neuroscientist, let alone any composer or musician, who really knows how music works on an individual brain and consciousness and the glorious emotional collection of atoms that constitute a human being. And long may that be the case. I LIKE TO THINK OF IT AS AN ETERNAL FLAME, SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE HUMAN HEART: ANY HUMAN HEART, IN ANY AGE.

Your preferred music may not be classical, of course. If you prefer the Bangles, circa 1989, that’s terrific. (And I love that song, by the way.) But if you have a modicum of curiosity about classical, my mission here is to make sure you never feel sheepish and/or somehow ‘less-than’ if you don’t know the first thing about it, especially by those forces who say, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways, ‘no, sorry, only white men allowed’ or ‘if you’re not rich enough to come to the opera then you don’t deserve to come to the opera’. Those forces are pernicious, long-embedded, but they are nothing to with the music itself. They are nothing at all. They can be overcome.

Because music is powerful. Music is not just sonorous air. Millions of people, over millennia, have drawn robust hope through music. Hope that can then be directed into other things: action, activism, inspiration, consolation, even survival. To channel the poet Seamus Heaney and his beautiful observation about the great paradox and renewing force of the imaginative arts, in one sense the efficacy of music is nil: ‘no lyric,’ he wrote, ‘has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.’ Or playwright Bertolt Brecht, who asked, ‘In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.’ Invariably human beings respond to tyranny, to horror, to despair, by making art and often, later, that’s how we have been able to hope, and somehow to cope.

On a September  afternoon in the annus horribilis that was 2020, going home from a hospital appointment, I came across a quartet playing on the streets in Chanakya Puri New Delhi, the embassy residences. They were four wildly talented youngsters, possibly recently just out of college. They had probably spent the majority of their lives dedicated to the pursuit of making it as a musician, sacrificing much and quite possibly racking up many thousands in debt. And now – this. No concerts; no tours; no real prospects. Yet a crowd of masked strangers, with their haunted pandemic expressions, were suddenly stopping, and listening, and smiling, and getting their phones out to record this moment (and hopefully, sending money electronically). The quartet were so good. And, perhaps this being New Delhi,  they were a cosmopolitan lot. They were playing Beethoven: late Beethoven, as it happened, a piece written in 1826 when the composer was almost totally deaf. I listened to them for a while, felt the autumn sunshine on my face, and was quietly inspired – with the music, with the city, with the world, with history and time and love and with the persistent notion that beauty and art and music, this is what gives life its endless, stubborn courage. This is what gives life its resilience.

This is what gives us hope.

This is something. CLASSICAL  MUSIC