Declassified: A Low-Key Guide to the High-Strung World of Classical Music - Hardcover

Warsaw-Fan Rauch, Arianna

 
9780593331460: Declassified: A Low-Key Guide to the High-Strung World of Classical Music
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059333146X ISBN 13: 9780593331460
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“A refreshingly fun guide” that reads “as if you’re a fly on the wall in conservatory auditions, cutthroat competitions and the obsessive practice routines of professional musicians.” (The New York Times)

Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch’s life-long fascination with classical music has taken her through Juilliard and into the shiny world of symphony halls and international concert tours. She’s loved classical music her whole life. But she’s also hated classical music her whole life. After all, if you can like Beyoncé without liking Bieber, you can certainly like Brahms without liking Bach—especially since they were born 148 years apart and the thing we call “classical music” is really just centuries of compositions shoved into one hodge-podge of a genre.
 
In Declassified, Warsaw-Fan Rauch blows through the cobwebs of elitism and exclusion and invites everyone to love and hate this music as much as she does. She offers a backstage tour of the industry and equips you for every listening scenario, covering: the 7 main compositional periods (even the soul-crushingly depressing Medieval period), a breakdown of the instruments and their associated personality types (apologies to violists and conductors), what it’s like to be a musician at the highest level (it’s hard), how to steal a Stradivarius (and make no money in the process), and when to clap during a live performance (also: when not to). Declassified cheekily demystifies the world of High Art while making the case that classical music matters, perhaps now more than ever.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch earned a Bachelor degree and Master of Music from the Juilliard School and has performed as a classical violinist in top venues around the world including Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall, and the Ravinia, Verbier, La Jolla Summerfest, and Aspen Music festivals. She has toured with such legendary artists as jazz trumpeter Chris Botti and Sir James Galway. Declassified is her first book.

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Chapter 1

classical music isn't a thing

A Very Biased Overview of 1,400 Years of Music

When I was a toddler, I risked all kinds of hearing loss so that I could lie under my father's piano, listening to him play Bach's Goldberg Variations. This was before I'd seen The Silence of the Lambs.

It was also before I discovered the Queen of the Night, before I developed those throat nodules, and before I started violin lessons. It was back when I was a bit like that little girl from MontrŽal-when Bach was just "beautiful music," and my ears were little more than enthusiastic sponges.

Bach was my favorite composer for much of my childhood. His pieces were filled with mysterious puzzles and dark, echoing caverns and those dazzling blades of sunlight that pierced through the clouds on gray days. All things that fascinated me.

There was also something about his music-its puzzle-like quality, perhaps-that challenged me to create my own. So one day, a few years into my musical studies (when I was five or six), I sat down with a pad of manuscript paper and one of those tiny golf pencils that are always lying around my parents' house, determined to compose the world's greatest piece for violin. I scratched away for what felt like hours-experimenting with different combinations of notes, tearing off pages and dramatically crumpling them up, crossing things out and rewriting until I reached perfection. When I'd crafted a whole phrase, I brought it to my dad. Some of my noteheads were on backward, I knew, but the music, I was sure, was incredible.

And I was right. It was incredible. It just wasn't original. It was the first two measures of Bach's G-Minor Violin Sonata.

Vivaldi was another one of my favorites at that age. I didn't love everything of his-I didn't care for "Spring" or "Summer" or anything you'd hear in a commercial for cat food-but his double cello concerto, his aria "Vedro con mio diletto," and his "Winter" all shared a clarity of sound, a rhythmic drive, and a sometimes-dark intensity that drew me to them. I loved Vitali, too. And Corelli.

Baroque music-we'll get to what that is in a bit-was my jam.

Do you know what wasn't my jam? Medieval music. I hated Medieval music.

The thing is, though, that for years I didn't know I hated it. Or rather: I didn't know Medieval music was a thing that existed. All I knew was that once every so often, a sparse, skeletal-sounding piece-the musical equivalent of SNL's Debbie Downer-would issue from those Quad speakers and suddenly the sky would turn black and all the plants in our house would wilt and all the joy in my tiny child-heart would instantly shrivel up. Then the piece would end and everything would go back to normal.

I'd never heard of Baroque music, either. I knew that I loved Bach and Vivaldi and Vitali and Corelli, but I didn't understand that there was a link between these composers-that they all belonged to the same group. It wasn't until later, when I was eightish, and my mom put up a poster in our bathroom outlining the six different periods of classical music-that I made the connection. That bathroom was where everything started to come together in my mind-where I realized that nearly all of the music I hated came from one single era. And when I realized this, I was pissed no one had told me sooner-because with that one word-"Medieval"-I could have spared myself hours of torment.

Which is why we're covering the compositional periods here, in chapter 1.


Classical Music Isn't a Thing

My kid was a much cuter toddler than I was. He had to be-because feeding him was a pain in the ass. He wouldn't eat anything that was green. It didn't matter whether it was an avocado or a slice of kiwi or the last of the pistachio macarons that Dadda brought home for Valentine's Day. If it was tinted or flecked with anything from celadon to emerald, he fed it to the trashcan monster before anyone could get it within smelling distance of his face.

To him, the logic was clear: he'd tried a green food once before and hadn't liked it-so it stood to reason that he'd find all other green foods equally objectionable.

Most people approach classical music in a similar way. They've heard snippets of it in movies and commercials and elevators-snippets, mind you, that are often chosen to support whatever stereotype said movie, commercial, or elevator is trying to promote-and they think they know how they feel about the entire body of work. But just as kale tastes nothing like Granny Smith apples, which taste nothing like pistachio macarons, Mozart sounds nothing like Shostakovich, which sounds nothing like Wagner. (Who, by the way, was a giant asshole.)

Classical music, as most people think of it, isn't a real thing. As I said in the intro, it's really just centuries of (all sorts of) music shoved into one hodgepodge of a genre. It encompasses hundreds of contrasting musical styles. Sometimes I say things like "classical music is beautiful" or "I love classical music" (turn back, like, three pages), but I find plenty of "classical" pieces truly unbearable. Like everything that came out of the Medieval period.

People seem to expect this kind of picking and choosing when it comes to other genres. You can like Beyoncé without liking Justin Bieber. And most people, I believe, like the Beatles without liking Nickelback. But ironically, the differences between Beyoncé and Bieber or the Beatles and Nickelback are far less drastic than the harmonic and rhythmic differences between Monteverdi and late Schoenberg or Debussy and Bach. (And I'm not even mentioning-yet-the differences between quartets and operas or piano sonatas and symphonies-or the differences created by the musicians who actually perform these works.)

The point is: you don't have to like all classical music in order to be allowed to listen to some of it.

My dream for you, insofar as this book is concerned, is not for you to be able to say, at the end of it, "I like classical music"-but for you to be able to say, rather, "I like Beethoven." Or "I like Rachmaninoff." Or "I appreciate the impeccable proportions and lyricism of Haydn and Mozart, but I prefer these attributes in the edgier, quirkier, more harmonically dissonant context of, say, Prokofiev during his neoclassical phase."

Only, please don't actually say that unless you're speaking to someone who already hates you.


Compositional Periods

There are, in fact, two "classical musics."

I know. First I said there was no classical music and now I'm saying there are two. Just bear with me for a minute.

At first, there really was no classical music. But then, people-people who are dead, so we can't yell at them-came in and started labeling things.

Classical Music the Genre, in its broadest definition, encompasses most of the Western music composed between AD 500 and 1900-ish, as well as all of that music composed after 1900-ish that stems from the same tradition (i.e., not pop, not jazz, not folk). Most people, though, when they speak of "classical music," mean Western music composed between 1600 and 1900, plus the music of a handful of composers after that stretch.

Then there's the Classical period, which lies within the frame of the larger genre, spanning from approximately 1730 to 1820. Both the Classical period and the classical genre are labels invented by later generations (the composers of this period, like Mozart and Haydn, for example, didn't think of themselves as "classical" composers)-but the Classical period is the more useful label, for reasons I will explain below.

Composers, like pop artists and bands, have their own unique sounds. These can even shift-and often do-over the course of a...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059333146X
ISBN 13 
9780593331460
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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