Symphonic Range

When making the case for the arts, the question I pose to audiences is this: When folks reach retirement age, ponder the future, and begin to sense their mortality, how many of them turn to the STEM disciplines? How many sign up for a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics refresher course? Not a lot, I wager. But how many turn to the arts, and take up an instrument, join a chorus, buy a dance or theater subscription, or set up an easel and begin to paint—like George W. Bush, whose new volume Portraits of Courage features his own recently completed canvases? In the end, most people long for something more than the practical comforts provided by the STEM fields. They seek solace, and insight into the meaning of life. When time counts, the arts matter.

And there’s another bonus. In the case of music, no other activity utilizes more parts of the brain. As Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitin have shown, music, with its demands on motor reflex, memory, cognition, emotion, and anticipation, stirs the synapses like nothing else. Music gives the cranial tissue a thorough workout—a phenomenon sometimes called “the Mozart effect.”

For those in search of both personal fulfillment and mental exercise, Jan Swafford’s new introduction to classical music is just the thing. A compact, reader-friendly volume, it traverses the repertoire from the Middle Ages to “Modernism and Beyond” in 36 short chapters, surveying 27 composers and providing general descriptions of the main stylistic periods. The composers covered include the usual suspects—Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Bartók—as well as some more-parochial specialists, such as Ives, Britten, and Ligeti. Swafford skirts opera composers other than Richard Wagner, claiming they would require another book, and Mendelssohn is oddly absent. Otherwise, everyone is here who should be here. (Well, sort of—more on that later).

Swafford is a witty and impassioned guide to the great composers and the great masterpieces. A composer, critic, and respected biographer of Johannes Brahms, Swafford taught classical music at the New England Conservatory for many years. He has mastered the composers, their biographies, and their compositions. Equally important for an introductory audience, he is intimately familiar with the rich layer of anecdotes that envelops the lives of the composers and enlivens every effective music history course.

Lawrence Kramer’s Why Classical Music Still Matters (see “Requiem for Strings,” The Weekly Standard, July 30, 2007) was a somber defense of classical music and its relevance in today’s society. Swafford’s work, by contrast, is an upbeat, uninhibited romp through the repertoire. Geared to a broad readership without specialized knowledge, it contains no music excerpts or accompanying CDs. Instead, Swafford points to favorite renditions that can be heard on the web, through YouTube and other free sources. The text resembles the narration on a London tour bus, with Swafford as the articulate, chatty guide:

So there you have it.

The chapter on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is characteristic of Swafford’s approach. After extracting the man from myth—Mozart was buried like most Viennese of the time, not in the pauper’s grave of legend—Swafford sketches his life, from coddled prodigy on tour to resentful provider of church music in Salzburg to celebrated composer of piano concertos and operas in Vienna. Swafford brings Mozart to life, describing his personal hobbies (air-rifle competitions and bowling games in Salzburg; horseback riding and billiards in Vienna), lusty letters to his wife Constanze, and lavish parties. But he also gives concise, insightful descriptions of key examples of Mozart’s writing: the Piano Concertos in C Major (K. 467) and D Minor (K. 466), the “Dissonant” String Quartet in C Major (K. 465), and the Symphony No. 38 in D Major (“Prague”).

Like many writers, Swafford places Mozart at the top of opera composers, with a unique ability to capture the psychological state of characters of all social levels, high, middle, and low. Here he is on The Magic Flute:

That Mozart could compose such sublime music seemingly without effort is one of the great miracles of Western music. And here I am reminded of a chestnut not related by Swafford: In the original manuscript of the piano Prelude and Fugue in C Major, (K. 383a), the fugue appears first, followed by the prelude. As Mozart explained in a letter to his sister Nannerl, to whom he sent the piece, the prelude ought to come first and the fugue afterward, of course; but since fugues are more difficult to compose than preludes, he first worked out the fugue in his head and then wrote it down while thinking out the prelude.

In reading Swafford’s survey, one is impressed once again by the dominating force of Ludwig van Beethoven. Johann Sebastian Bach may be viewed as the number-one composer today (according to a 2011 New York Times survey) but it was Beethoven who made life challenging for all who followed. Where could other composers go after Beethoven’s symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets, each one innovative and perfect in its own way? Franz Schubert started many symphonies—the “Unfinished” is just one—without being able to bring them to completion; Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin retreated to noncompetitive piano miniatures and chamber pieces. Franz Liszt tossed out the traditional symphony altogether and turned instead to the orchestral poem. And Gustav Mahler tried to out-Beethoven Beethoven with his gigantic symphonies that attempted to embrace the cosmos. For composers seeking a new voice, it was tough going after Beethoven.

It was Beethoven, too, who first estranged audiences by writing pieces they couldn’t understand. The “Eroica” Symphony, unveiled in 1805, was the first musical work known to incur hostility: Its jarring dissonances, harmonic meanderings, and unprecedented length bewildered listeners accustomed to hearing the pleasant tones of Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn. From Beethoven onward, the gap between composers and audiences inexorably widened, as music progressives expanded the range of dissonance, trying ever-more-adventurous harmonic schemes. The chief signposts along the road to controversy were Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865), likened by the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick to “the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel,” Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), described as “feeding time at the zoo” by the Daily Telegraph, and finally, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which famously caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913. The journey from the Eroica to atonality was marked by detours (Brahms, Antonin Dvorak) and dead ends (Charles Ives, Anton Webern). But it was not until very recently that classical music finally took a sharp U-turn, with the return to romantic sonorities of postmodernist composers.

Playing on this theme, Swafford stirs up interest by stressing the heated rivalries that developed from opposing camps of composers. In the 19th century, it was the archconservative Brahms, who went so far as to use the chaconne form of the Baroque in his Fourth Symphony, versus the irascible radical Wagner, who pushed traditional tonality to the edge with the unresolved cadences of Tristan und Isolde. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Mahler lined up behind Brahms, while Ives, Claude Debussy, and Richard Strauss carried forth Wagner’s iconoclastic approach.

In the 20th century, it was Stravinsky (who, like Picasso, went through numerous artistic stages) versus Schoenberg, who took Wagner’s work to its endgame by developing the 12-tone system that treated all pitches equally, producing atonality. (“I write what I feel in my heart,” Schoenberg stated—to which an English critic responded that one could only assume that he was “suffering from some unclassifiable and peculiarly virulent form of cardiac disease.”) Debussy, Darius Milhaud, and Dmitri Shostakovich adopted aspects of Stravinsky’s style, while Webern and Alban Berg followed Schoenberg, establishing the Second Viennese School (the first being Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven).

As a composer, Swafford exhibits a special fondness for modern music, and his discussion of 20th-century American figures is especially compelling. He compares the astonishingly wide spectrum of sounds in Ives’s music, for instance, to the “prodigal diversity” of America. Indeed, Ives’s wild mix of marching band sounds, American hymns, college songs, quotations from European classical composers, fiddle tunes, and more reflects the melting pot of the nation itself. Many of Ives’s compositions had to wait decades for public performance, but they’ve now taken hold, thanks to champions such as Leonard Bernstein, who revived the symphonies and other large orchestral works.

“The fabric of existence weaves itself whole,” Swafford quotes Ives as saying. “You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.”

Aaron Copland, although trained in France, also developed a uniquely American idiom. A protégé of the French teacher Nadia Boulanger, Copland sought to solve the disintegrating relations between the music-loving public and active composers by writing music that mirrored America: vibrant, jazzy, folksy, appealing. His three great ballet scores—Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring—written between 1938 and 1944 revolutionized the big orchestra sound. The famous “Hoedown” from Rodeo has the potential to be a cliché, Swafford points out, but its brilliant orchestration, drawn from Stravinsky and Mahler, and its ecstatic fiddle tune take the day. It’s difficult to say precisely what makes Copland’s music sound so American: perhaps the rugged harmonies and reliance on open fifths, which somehow seem to reflect the open prairies. Copland was also interested in general music education and wrote a bestselling introductory text, What to Listen for in Music. Swafford’s volume follows this tradition.

(Also mentioned in a “Further Modernist Listening” section are George Gershwin and Samuel Barber. With his Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F, Gershwin attempted to merge classical music and jazz, a step also taken in his American update of Chopin, Three Preludes for piano. And Swafford makes a good case for Barber, whose beautiful Adagio for Strings has become a “ubiquitous accompaniment for tragedies depicted in the media.”)

Although Swafford’s writing on modern music is strong, his account drops off in the 1970s and ’80s without exploring the recent rebellion against the harsh dissonances of the 12-tone system. He stops with the minimalist music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, whose repetition of small melodic fragments creates a hypnotic effect and vague sense of unity. Adams’s Nixon in China, which premiered in 1987, is about as late as Swafford goes. There is no mention of postmodernist music—scores that have successfully returned to the plush consonant sounds of romanticism. The important works of Arvo Pärt, Julia Wolfe, Richard Danielpour, and Tan Dun, for example, are not discussed, nor is the mystical music of Kaija Saariaho, whose L’Amour de loin just received a stunning production at the Metropolitan Opera. The last 20 years have been a happy period for audiences, for composers have written music they can actually enjoy.

In “Conclusions,” Swafford discusses the early-music movement that began in the 1970s and has grown to prominence in modern performance. The recreation of the instruments, orchestras, and choirs of the 17th and 18th centuries, in particular, has opened the ears of audiences to new-old sounds. By the 1990s, the early-music movement had more or less reclaimed the Baroque repertory and was moving into music of the classical and romantic periods as well. Wood-framed pianos offered softer but richer performances of Chopin waltzes, and valveless horns thinner but more nuanced renditions of Brahms symphonies. We thought we knew the music of these composers thoroughly, but the early-music movement has revealed yet another side to 18th- and 19th-century masters that has further piqued interest.

Since 2000, however, it has become increasingly clear that early music, world music, and popular music are merging with classical music. The great eclectic gathering of diverse sounds envisioned a hundred years ago by Charles Ives has come to pass. From my own teaching of introductory music classes, I can report that today’s students still listen to classical music—but they don’t single it out as anything special or elite. Armed with laptops, tablets, smartphones, and iPods, and assisted by iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, and other online resources, they consume vast amounts of music on a daily basis. And they have astonishingly cosmopolitan palates, happily taking in reggae, heavy metal, gamelan, hip hop, grunge, salsa, jazz, classical, klezmer—and much more, in equal measure. It’s all one playlist, it’s all music, and it’s all “classic.”

Language of the Spirit, with its limited focus on the traditional classical canon and its omission of women, non-Western, and popular composers, inadvertently comes across as a kind of pitch to “make classical music great again.” The narrative is written with polish and finesse, and it conveys great conviction and enthusiasm. But it’s at odds with the day-to-day experience of today’s millennials, for whom fusion and global tastes are the norm. I don’t know where we’re going as a nation, but from what I see in the classroom, that’s where we’re headed in music and the arts.

George B. Stauffer is dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts and distinguished professor of music history at Rutgers.