It has often been said that, in order to discuss music, one needs to be familiar with a vast technical vocabulary, and that, even when one is fluent in this musical jargon, music still remains difficult to talk about. Without this knowledge, the common wisdom goes, music is simply impossible to describe.  Consequently music appreciation books have sought to acquaint readers with concepts like tonic-dominant relationship and polyphony.  But these terms are complicated and delicate.  And I liked classical music long before I knew what these things were anyway.

    In my last article (Two-and-a-Half-
Cheers for Music Appreciation, I outlined an approach to classical music via the language of aesthetics.  I recommended to newcomers that they begin with "programmatic" compositions and make their way gradually to "absolute" ones. At the end of the article, however, I admitted that such simple guided listening couldn¹t achieve on its own the goals of classical music appreciation.  Aesthetic categorization doesn¹t necessary sensitize listeners to the musical contrasts that are so essential to perceive in classical music.

   Some would argue that familiarity with concepts like tonic-dominant relationship and polyphony are the only way to get listeners really listening.  But I don¹t agree.

    Let¹s think about the arts in general.  What do non-artists find most mysterious about the artistic process?  As a composer, many have asked me questions like "How do you begin a piece?" or "Where does the music come from?"  It¹s the origins of artistic creation people find most mysterious, and this gives us a clue as to where a program for classical music appreciation might begin.

    Every art has what I would call a zero-ground--a blank field upon which the particular art-form is made.  Every painting begins with a blank canvas; every sculpture a block of stone; every movie a storyline. 

   When we look at a painting we only begin where the artist began by keeping in mind the blank canvas.  In a painting filled with images and colors (Van Gogh comes to mind), we notice the artist has come a long way from the quietude of the zero-ground. 

   Because the zero-ground has been thoroughly obliterated by the painting, there seems to be a lot of energy in paintings of this type.  Other paintings, much portraiture for instance, contains prominent, monochromatic backgrounds. While these areas are not the canvas per se, their flat, undifferentiated spaces cannot help but recall the zero-ground the painter began with.  These paintings have less energy.  More recently, minimalist art has provided us with paintings of great simplicity and quietude through only gentle alteration of the zero-ground.

    So what¹s the zero-ground of music? 

    Silence.

    Music is an aural phenomenon, just as painting is a visual one. Painting begins with the invisible (represented by the canvas), and music begins with silence.  Or, to put it more accurately, silence is the blank field, the zero-ground, upon which music plays. 

   What does this mean for music appreciation?

   The teacher of music appreciation must first begin to sensitize his or her students to dynamic contrasts  loud and soft.  This may sound naive, but it is not.  Pop-song after pop-song after pop-song is played at a constant dynamic.  Pop-songs are either loud or soft and very, very rarely change dynamics within themselves.  Sometimes a group juxtaposes loud and soft sections, but almost never does the music crescendo or decrescendo. Classical music, on the other hand, is filled with sections of contrasting loudness and softness and powerful crescendi and decrescendi.

    By perceiving dynamics, listeners, for much of the standard repertoire, will have come a long way to unlocking the magic of classical music.  Simply by noticing when the music is loud or soft, a new melody or color can spring into view.  Furthermore, dynamics have been a fundamental element of stylistic change throughout music history.  For example, a Bach Prelude -and-Fugue calls for little or no dynamic change.  Why?  Because there are few changes in the musical texture and usually no thematic contrasts.  In Mozart, however, different themes compete for supremacy, and dynamics contribute to the identity of each theme: one might be loud, and another might be soft.  In a more contemporary or recent music of extremely rapid change, like Elliott Carter¹s, dynamics are constantly changing in accordance with the music¹s thematic and textural density.
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18-year-old Armenian wunderkind tosses off the Sibelius with a dazzling display of sheer virtuosity and delivers a much deeper, more sober reading of his fellow countryman's bouncy  masterpiece than we are accustomed to hearing.  Eye-opening performance and a performer to watch.

Re-issue of an inspired 1978 
performance of the symphony many consider Shostakovich's best by conductor Kurt Sanderling with the Orchestre national de France. Composed immediately following Stalin's death and premiered on 17 December 1953, this massive work seems to sum up the experience of the Soviet people under the dictator's tyranny,  especially in the terrifying Allegro which evokes a machine that grinds men down, before a more optimistic finale that the composer conceived in the spirit of Haydn.

Tony Banks, founder of the rock band Genesis, goes "classical"  with this seven-movement suite, each of them an orchestral sound picture using its title to set the mood.  The result is an extremely well-recorded bag of ambiant musical noodles that are less frivelous than they might have been and, in any event, less painful to the ears  than listening to Phil Collins sing.
 

During the German occupation of Denmark in World War II,  Herman D. Koppel, who was Jewish, and his family had to flee to Sweden, where they met a childhood friend of Koppel who had become a baroness. In her house Koppel could compose in peace and quiet. The Third Symphony is dedicated to her.  Despite his own safe surroundings, Koppel’s experience of the war, and of the execution of his Polish-Jewish family in German concentration camps, had a profound impact on his works from this period.  These are works of anguish that explore the depths of the composer's emotions--a final liberation from the bloodless influence of his teacher Carl Neilsen--and the birth of major, overlooked 20th century music figure.

One of many important large-scale fragments left uncompleted by Schoenberg at his death, the oratorio Jacob's Ladder was finished by Winfried Zillig, once a student, at the behest of Schoenberg's widow after his death.  Schoenberg wrote the libretto between 1915 and 1917 based on the book of Genesis, overlaid with elements from Strindberg's drama Jacob Wrestles, and Balzac's novel Seraphita. He wrote a large of chunk of the music shortly after but was called to the army and never got around to finishing it.  This is a brilliant, committed performance that captures a little-known masterpiece by one of the 20th century's greatest composers at the height of his creative powers.

When composing his music for Belisa, Poul Rovsing Olsen was deeply inspired by Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's drama and by the passionate and demanding character of Belisa herself. The opening scene of the opera is the wedding night of Belisa and Don Perlimplin, where the young bride takes 5 lovers in front of her decrepit groom that is sound asleep. The drama develops from stylized opera buffa into the ambiguous and surreal with an unexpected ending, and Poul Rovsing Olsen's music reflects Lorca’s drama like a sensuous kaleidoscope with French and Oriental overtones. 

Beth Anderson's unabashedly romantic "swales" are as pure as a Kentucky mountain spring,  frisky as a new-born colt rolling in bluegrass, and infectious as a third-grade measles outbreak.  They are light, without being lightweight, and conquer the ear by their deceptively easygoing charm.  If you like Paul Schoenfeld's brand of Americana, you'll like these pieces a lot.
 

No one has done more to champion guitar music by contemporary composers than the brilliant guitarist and co-founder of Bridge Records, David Starobin.  This CD includes solo and chamber works written between 1992 and 2000  by Gunther Schuller, Michael Starobin, Richard Wernick, Melinda Wagner, David Liptak, and Paul Lansky--all in premiere recordings. Volume Six also contains George Crumb's "Mundus Canis"--with the composer performing (and whispering and yelling) on percussion. To conclude the disc, Elliott Carter's fantastically inventive sextet, "Luimen" is performed by Speculum Musicae, New York City's virtuoso new music band.