9-14-2023 4:03am

You Say, “Too Rich for my Blood…”; Craig Bennett Says, "Not So!"

Lesley Misko Editor

by Craig Bennett*

“Too rich for my blood!”

“BO-ring!”

“Nothing but a bunch of guys in powdered wigs and knickers playing squeaky violins.”

That’s typical of what I’ve heard all too often over the years whenever music came up in conversation and I happened to mention that I’d been a serious fan of classical music since I was about thirteen.

So OK. What gets categorized as classical music can be a little intimidating, if only because there’s so much of it and it’s all so different. But if you can think of it as nothing more than serious music for symphony orchestra, you might realize that we’ve all been listening to it—and enjoying it—since we were kids. How and where? At the movies. Ever since theaters installed a piano below or aside of the screen and hired someone to play it, movies have been accompanied by music. And there’s a reason.

Music affects the emotions more quickly, more directly, and more powerfully than any of the other arts. Visual and literary art are mediated through images or the written word. Sound is more direct. It doesn’t do what it does by presenting images or verbal descriptions that must then find a connection somewhere in the viewer’s or the reader’s emotional circuitry. It expresses those emotions, which are drawn immediately from the listener’s consciousness by a sort of instantaneous emotional osmosis, much like the essence of the tea in a tea bag is drawn out into a cup of hot water.

Try to imagine Star Wars, for example, without John Williams’s magnificent score—and the London Symphony Orchestra performing it. How can we? It’s way too much an essential part of the whole. The sequence in the Lord of the Rings trilogy where the beacon of Gondor is lit and the camera slowly pans across a series of snow-frosted mountain peaks where, one by one, other beacon fires spring to life in the distance… and the music, swelling in volume, growing more powerful as each of the wind sections enters in its turn, ascending scale-wise as additional beacons erupt in flame to convey the message of Gondor’s need, and lifting the audience’s emotions to coalesce in a lump in the throat and a surge of adrenalin that makes them want to stand up and cheer. What would that sequence be without the music?

And what many people fail to realize is that the orchestral music that moves and excites us in the great film scores is written for the same instruments, using the same compositional techniques and devices, as the music of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel, Mahler, and other late-nineteenth and twentieth century composers, as well as those of the present century. There are passages I can listen to in Sibelius’s second symphony, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, Mahler’s third symphony, Wagner’s Parsifal, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, or Copland’s Appalachian Spring, for example, that equal or surpass in their emotional impact any such passages I’ve ever heard in a film score.

And something else I’ve heard in those conversations alluded to above is an occasional confession such as, “You know, I think I might really like classical music, but I don’t know anything about it.” Phooey! What did you have to know about rock ‘n’ roll before you were able to enjoy it? Or jazz? Or Broadway show music? Or, for that matter, your favorite film scores? Just as with any other kind of music, all you need to know about so-called “classical” music is what you like. And there is more than three centuries’ worth of such music for the symphony orchestra, chamber orchestras and small ensembles, the ballet, and the opera stage, not to mention various kinds of choral ensembles, solo piano, and so-on. That’s a lot to choose from, and a lot to dismiss so casually, especially from a standpoint of minimal familiarity with what’s being dismissed.

If you’ve ever wondered why orchestras are still performing this stuff and people are still listening to it, it may be worth doing a little such listening yourself. You might be very pleasantly surprised.

* Craig H. Bennett holds degrees from Ursinus College and The Johns Hopkins University and is retired from the two-year college faculty of Valley Forge Military Academy and College. Prior to that he taught English in the Boyertown Area School District. He is the author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth.