I have never really recovered from a concert I heard in my teenage years. I hope I never will. In a world where the media mostly report war, political lies or drivel about vacuous celebrities, I think it's important to remember that there is such a thing as excellence. There are emotions such as wonder, selflessness and bliss. There are scientists, artists, explorers and mystics who catch moments of greatness, luminous and evanescent like motes of dust in a sunbeam. Like dandelion seeds floating unseen in the void. Like stars floating in the radiant darkness, blown by the lips of the Unseen. There is music that is worth living for, even dying for.
Because I ended up playing the Double-Bass, which led to playing in youth orchestras, my mother (bless her) often took me to concerts at the Barbican music hall which had and has excellent acoustics. I was lucky that I didn't own many records, which meant I frequently heard great pieces of music for the first time played by world-class orchestras. This is a rare privilege in our over-saturated age of canned music.
One evening around 1987 my mum booked a concert featuring two 20th Century composers I had never heard of. In the first half was a strange, unsettlingly modern piece by the Hungarian composer Ligeti. At that age, I had no knowledge of 'modern' classical music, i.e. atonal or challenging sounds without melody or Romanticism. The Ligeti was ok: I didn't really get it, but my ears felt refreshed by listening to something different from the normal cliched popular favourites. We decided to give Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) ago, never having heard of him.
45 minutes later, I staggered out of the concert hall not quite able to describe what had just happened. My mother noted that she saw grown men in tears, but that they looked like 'nice men'. A couple of days later I went and bought a book about Nielsen by the leading British composer Robert Simpson, which was deeply reflective and introduced me to the idea that one can write about music as a philosophy, a code and even a reason for living. Nielsen had had this effect on Simpson - and, as I later discovered, on Sir Simon Rattle as a young boy. He is just unclassifiable - modern music as it should have been.
The 14 year old boy felt the hush descend on the audience, then a wavering, oscillating violin line. Interesting. Mysterious wind chords twined around each other. Lower strings entered, and by now we were in a new sound world. Far from strident dissonance or manipulative effects, I was hearing pure sound, pure harmony. I was enthralled. The music flowed on, utterly gripping and full of tense drama. Suddenly the mood moved towards a change to a sinister war march. The music sounded Russian, gripping, as if the composer both hated war and felt its excitement and remorseless imperative. The intensity faded and then...the most exquisite and joyful polyphony, calm, invincible and mighty, as I later read in Robert Simpson, an impossible fusion of the perfect structure of Bach and the dramatic power of Beethoven. But it had a joy and conviction all of its own. Suddenly the tension builds as the dark and sinister tendrils of music re-entered.
And then something unimaginable. The snare drum, which had played military rolls before, suddenly started improvising, deafeningly loud over the joyous, glorious and sad music. An out and out war between the massed orchestra and the snare drum led to a chaos where the drum and the orchestra were destroying yet mysteriously enhancing each other. Finally the drum was carried along with the sun radiant melody as the music died away into a wistful, desolately victorious clarinet solo, full of warmth and loneliness. It sounded like one DNA strand of music had evolved into a beautiful tree of music, fractally showing the original shoot.
Then the second movement - in a different and bright key, full of wildly free energy, moving somewhere, forward to more glorious melody (including - to my surprise the theme tune from Star Wars, which John Williams evidently pinched from Nielsen) leading through a chilly, arch and fiendishly virtuosic section of Bach like fugal writing. Once again the tension and excitement built to the final section where I realised that I and the entire audience were utterly transfixed, floating in an altered state and held to the music until the impossibly glorious happy-sad fanfares of brass finished this unique 2 movement symphony in a blaze of light.
Over the next few days, I experienced various emotions. One was a barely articulate realisation that this symphony was about something - that its triumph included pain, that life was beyond trivial feelings of pleasant and unpleasant. Another was that this was obviously the greatest symphony of the 20th Century and why was Nielsen not better known - my first education in the inadequacies of popular and critical judgement. Later it became obvious that this was a direct response to World War One and that the gunfire like snare drum evoked the senseless horror of that war, without the usual nafness of programmatic music. When I began to study Nielsen, I realised how he used emergent tonality - rather than sticking to one key, his later music developed from one tonal centre to others, giving his music a unique sense of dynamism. He was also vastly proficient in the older techniques of polyphony and counterpoint and by blending these with his own innovations he proved that there were other ways forward for classical music than the willful ugliness and posturing of much atonal music.
I was lucky that one of my school teachers happened to have a large collection of Classical vinyl and lent me what turns out to have been one of the great recordings of Nielsen's Fifth Symphony - Paavo Berglund's 1970s recording with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I have listened to this piece many times over the succeeding 25 years and every time I still have the same reaction. Most music has an element of self-consciousness - we get clicked out of the zone by a mannerism, a sense that the player or writer is 'doing' something. It is very rare for 40 minutes of music to grip the listener from start to finish. This isn't entertainment - it is the actual, raw force of life beyond sentiment. It is life which is, as Nielsen said, inextinguishable.
My other musical revelation of that year was discovering The Beatles. An old cassette of Abbey Road lying around the house - and like Nielsen, whether you liked their songs or not, the pure sound of their music was amazing. The Avatar light of Here Comes The Sun; the dark black hole inferno of I Want You / She's So Heavy. I later realised there is a direct line between the great Classical composers who reintroduced folk modes in the early 20th Century like Nielsen, Bartok and Vaughan Williams and the 1960s phenomenon of (particularly) British folk-pop-rock. It revolves around the interval of the 7th. Come back to my blog at a later date to hear more about my discoveries and how they relate to Eastern music.
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