My developing musical taste; in cats.

I saw these .gifs at this blog the other day and really liked them. It seems the "Record Store Cats" have been out on the Internet for a while. Check them all out at this site.

It seems we all go through the same phases in classical musical taste; I remember going from Bach and Mozart to Chopin and Liszt to eventually discovering the whole spectrum of music out there.

Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach. The Brandenburg Concertos, the Well Tempered Clavier. Catchy melodies and music that makes you feel tingly all over. Beethoven as a gateway into the harder stuff out there. I remember owning a CD with Mozart concertos 9 and 21 by Alicia de la Rocha. I listened to it so many times it literally wore out from over-use. It was a simpler time then, going out to a record store and getting a "Greatest Classical Hits" CD guaranteed to contain Albinoni's adagio and a few of Vivaldi's seasons and Air on the G string and Pachelbel's cannon and probably Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I'd listen to all kinds of popular music (I am ashamed to admit to some of the albums I once owned) but classical music was a peaceful refuge.

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One day I went out and laid out a bunch of cash on an eight CD set called "The Great Piano Concertos". Mozart 21 and Beethoven "Emperor"; been there, done that. Then followed Brahms number 1... oh my God. Grieg. Rachmaninoff 2. Schumann. Liszt 1. Chopin 2.... TCHAIKOVSKY!! Forget Bach and Mozart and those guys, this music really moves! Are those things actually possible to do on a piano?! Does anyone remember that rush of adrenaline that comes the very first time you hear one of those things? The first time I listened to the third movement of Brahms number 1 it hit the very end and I pushed the rewind button immediately and heard it again. And again. And then once more. After hearing Grieg for the first time I was so full of energy that I was ready to go out into the street and punch someone in the groin, set things on fire. I remember that I was listening to it on my headphones while taking the dirty laundry to the washing room when I was a pre-teen. I must have been funny to look at because I was practically running there, jumping with every step; kicking things in my way, throwing the clothes around in the laundry room. This music was revolution, it practically begged me to go out and do something crazy.

After the initial shock, came a phase that most pianists will remember. The "I love Chopin" phase, followed by the Liszt and the Rachmaninoff phase. Every single piano student I've met goes through it eventually. Not only is the music amazing but the sheer virtuosity of it is shocking. I remember listening to Mazeppa for the first time with my mouth hanging open through the whole piece. Eventually you get used to the virtuosity  once you listen to the really ridiculous piano transcriptions out there. Then comes the emo phase; the I'm a misunderstood artist phase. Maybe some Mahler, some Scriabin. As the musical taste became more complex, some Debussy. If you're into opera, some heavy Verdi or some -ugh, shudder- Puccini. Everything is so dreamy, you are flying around on waves of melody in that complete corny artiness that only teenagers seem to have. I remember it so well.

Then came a day when someone let me borrow a Stravinsky CD. The Rites of Spring.

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Holy crap. What the hell? What instrument is that? Wait, a bassoon? Do they actually go that high? What time signature is this written in? Wait, what is going on? I don't understand anything. Oh, there's that bassoon again. Whoa, new movement. What's it called? Dance of the Adolescents? I'm head bangin'. I need a mosh pit! Boom, boom, boom, boom; clang, clang, whoosh... this is like a Star Wars sound track! (John Williams is guilty of a lot plagiarism by the way). Then some creepy stuff, then some more head banging. End of CD. Rewind. Start again.

That was my first experience with the Rites of Spring. Once you listen to that for the first time you can't go back to Chopin and enjoy it in the same way. Then I discovered that there was all kinds of piano music out there that was like this. Shostakovich, Bartok, Stravinsky himself. Ravel. Then I hit the mother-load: Prokofiev. His third piano concerto and then his piano sonatas. And then, everything else. Dissonant scrumptious music. After all that rubato and pretty melodies, these things have rhythm again. Music stops being so dreamy and artsy. Music is funky again. And no lack of virtuosity here, Liszt and Chopin seem tame after listening to Prokofiev's sixth sonata, or the Cadenza for the second piano concerto. How many pianos is this for again? Two? Three? There is no way that that is a single piano playing!

Martha Argerich's CD from the Phillips Great Pianists collection seems to be like a magnet for all those teenagers in this phase, searching out and devouring all this music that is new to their ears. Ravel's G major concerto, Gaspard de la Nuit, Bach's second Partita (that C minor seems to attract teenagers like flies to a garbage can) and Prokofiev's third concerto. I think at least half of my new students in the 15-17 age group list that as their favorite recording whenever I ask them what music they like. I know I was completely in love with that CD, until some heartless miscreant broke my wife's (then just a friend) car window and stole all her Cd's. I just hope somewhere out there, someone discovered they loved classical music- although all those Cd's probably ended up in a dumpster somewhere.

All the dissonance in that music builds up tolerance. You go on to Ligeti and then rediscover Alban Berg and Schoenberg and eventually, Messiaen and Lutowslawski. Over time, though, something seems to happen to the music. Those CD booklets are really interesting, and you look kind of cool to your friends listening to all this stuff nobody knows, but the actual music just becomes more and more difficult to digest.

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Holy crap. And not in a good way, like with Stravinsky. Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen, serialism and electronic music and weird stuff that is more about performance art than actual music. I play all that stuff, and I like a lot of it. I listen to it occasionally, when I am in the mood. But back then, when I first encountered it, it was so alien that it completely drove me away. It scared me, it was creepy as hell. If it did that to me, having loved music my whole life, what will it do to someone who rarely shows up at a concert hall and doesn't know what to expect? Lots of composers out there talk about how their music just needs more exposure and about things like "educating the public" and "expanding people's horizons". There's a reason why most of the people that were composing in these styles decades ago are now embracing a kind of neo-romanticism way of writing, or a funkier, more rhythmic style. It's because, while interesting on paper, most of that music was boring and unappealing to listen to. A concert wasn't a pleasurable experience anymore, it became more like getting mugged by a pack of people wielding musical instruments.

As with any other phase of musical history, the overwhelming majority of music being written is complete garbage. If history teaches us anything, it is that the people who are hailed today as the new great musical geniuses are not going to be the ones remembered in posterity. Who knows; maybe this age's Bach is living in complete poverty somewhere, his music only known to a handful of his friends or sitting- unlistened to- on a MySpace page somewhere.

I really tried to like this back then, but the more I listened to it, the more it drove me away. I tried to read some scores, and most of them were unreadable gibberish that had to be decoded before I could play a single note. Ironically, modern music is one of the styles I've been told that I play very well. My best performances have been as a pianist at a contemporary music festival, playing music I hate by new composers who, while dressed extravagantly and were full of delightful eccentricities, had no idea what they were doing. I've done a lot of performances with music by people like Morton Feldman, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann (with rehearsals with him in person), Iannis Xenakis and all sorts of lesser known composers that sound pretty much like any of the above.

I've grown to like it but at the time, it drove me away from classical music from a while.

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That was my next phase. Screw all this. Let's see whats playing on the radio. Some Beatles, some Zeppelin... or I'll take out all my old Vivaldi records and start the whole cycle back up again.