Richard Mellor
5-12-21
I don't read music but I love music and am never without it, particularly when
I'm alone. I have thought music is best described as a period of time within
which there are periods of silence and sounds of varying lengths. But what do I
know and who cares. If it is pleasing to the ear, if it invokes within the
listener emotions and feelings then it’s doing its job. Dizzy Gillespie
commented that he didn’t care much for music, he just liked sounds. Either way,
music is without doubt the international language.
I was fortunate being from a working class background that
my parents both liked to listen to classical music. They were particularly fond
of Johan Strauss and some of the lighter stuff but at least it wasn’t foreign to
me and I began to develop a taste of my own. I remember the first album I got,
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and with it was his piece Capricio Italien. I liked
the power and grandeur of the 1812 and the canons and could imagine Napoleon’s
forces being driven from Russian soil; the overture was Tchaikovsky’s
contribution celebrating that victory.
Over the years I branched out and came to appreciate other composers and styles. But on listening to Bach for the first time I thought the man must have been mad or on some 17th century equivalent of today’s amphetamines. It just seemed so jumbled to me.
I have come to appreciate Bach more and I really enjoyed the
video above. Not really understanding the mechanics, or theory behind music doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it, after
all, the end result is just sounds. But the science fascinates me and thanks to
technical innovation and the Internet, not to mention You Tube, we have so much
information and knowledge at our fingertips. Yes, there’s a lot of junk and we
have to be selective but it’s there.
Bach was a composer of the Baroque Period, but what we call collectively
classical music was not written for the masses of course. The patrons and money
behind the composer were the feudal aristocracy and religious authorities and
Bach wrote much of his music for the Lutheran churches of his time. In the main
the music is religious based. But even for an atheist, anyone that writes music
or produces any form of human expression lauding the force they believe is the
creator of the universe, is bound to produce some powerful stuff.
Working class people often tend to think as classical music as alien to us; it belongs to others and it’s highbrow. It’s like many art forms that are made possible through the backing of the ruling classes and not particularly encouraged among the masses. But no one owns music. I like music we are hearing today from the Sahara and Sahel, it is mine as much as it belongs to the Touareg people. It can originate in many places and cultures but belongs to any listener.
Some time ago I posted a video of a well-known cellist playing Bach’s G major cello prelude and that was a fascinating experience for people like me and I really encourage folks to watch it. When I watch something like that it makes me feel great love for humanity that we can produce such beauty. In the video above the narrator explains the genius of Bach when it came to music theory and his use of certain notes and chords. It seems to me when looked at this way, the composer is a mathematician of sorts, at least, it seems to be the case with Bach.
In the last analysis for the listener it is the sound and how it is constructed that matters. Beethoven’s impressive 9th Symphony, by some accounts the greatest symphony of them all, has in it 4th movement, the choir and the words of the German Poet Schiller’s Ode To Joy but this powerful piece has been used by Nazi’s the Stalinist regime of the former Soviet Union and no doubt others. Powerful images and sounds are not responsible for the aims and ideology of those using them.
At the end of video above, the narrator recommends a BBC documentary about Bach and his life, looking at it from a different perspective that is traditionally presented. It is titled, A Passionate Life and can be found at this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZVn9NZqyxs
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