High-Brow Music Stuff

        Music

The rain returned,

so I turned off

my CD player

to listen to it.

I think Telemann

would’ve understood.

  

           Negative Aesthetic Preferences

I’d really rather enjoy music than have it irritate me –

indeed, I prefer enjoyment to irritation in all things –

but music goes deeply into my who-I-am,

and I can’t bring myself to enjoy musical syrup,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy bombast,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy superficial catchiness,

I can’t bring myself to enjoy smug self-importance,

and I can’t bring myself to enjoy

the florid glorification of the essentially trivial,

generally misleading, and frequently destructive

biochemical phenomena that are emotions.

  

              Too Bad For Some Of Us

Monk once said,

“All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.”

The key word there is ‘subconsciously’,

because they may have never studied any maths in their lives,

but they were born with mathematics

imprinted in their brains,

and their minds work mathematically

whether they want them to or not.

Mine doesn’t.

Composer and Listener

One of the reasons

that I’m fond of the music

of Johann Sebastian Bach

is that it is,

as Martin complained to me,

overwhelmingly mathematical.

What makes this good for me

is that my mind

is not mathematical at all,

so I’m not suckered into

trying to understand it,

and can just experience it

as it washes over me.

  

    The Best of Bach

I saw an ad for a CD

called The Best of Bach.

Johann Sebastian Bach

composed more than eleven hundred

pieces of music,

all of them brilliant.

I think I’d probably

dislike personally

whoever it was

with the hugeness

of self-confidence

and teflon ego

needed to judge and assert

which two dozen or so

of these qualify

as Bach’s best.

           Minimal

During an afternoon walk

I was for some reason

blessedly able

to maintain in my head

the repetition of

a minimalist bar

of wordless notes

to distract me.

I say blessedly

because every undistracted moment

had come to be thoroughly filled

with sorrow, despair, and hurt,

and seemed overwhelmingly

likely to continue

to be so.

          Perceptions Of The Art Of Music

He told me he was a musician,

so I played him Frank Zappa’s ‘Gumbo Variations’,

one of his most musically challenging and rewarding

instrumental recordings at that time,

thinking that any real musician

would appreciate it.

Then he told me that what he’d meant

was that he’d played guitar

for youth-group singalongs at his church

(Catholic – but he had a Jewish-sounding surname)

and that what I’d just played for him

was about the most obnoxious thing

he’d ever heard.