A Third World Kinda Love...

12/30/2005 12:33 AM

Classical music is something forgotten in today’s America. Classical music is something practiced for a music lesson, something owned by university music faculty, something of which we receive bland enlightenment from NPR nightshift deejays. Jane Austin’s characters often gathered excitedly for a piano performance of some young local beauty, and like Shakespeare’s plays, were high events of a season in a fashion we can hardly imagine. Is it possible that a musical composition generated such a stir in high society of the few past centuries? As conductors attempt to recreate the excitement, the novelty, the brilliance of many a composer, we drone off, thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, about dinner, about what to buy the in-laws for Christmas, or about where to go after the concert. Going to a symphonic orchestra concert is usually an effort done with the motivation to gain something called extra credit, not quite the premier excitement of New York City or Chicago at any given point. The concept that such music at one time was the rave, the cutting edge in entertainment in past ages is beyond the reach of our imagination, seemingly a fantasy that professors created to encourage musicians in their endeavors.

Living in a third world country brings new perspective. I distinctly remember, after having lived in Antigua, Guatemala for merely eight weeks, walking into an orchestral performance in the town square and forgetting everything but the glorious sounds the strings and wind instruments breathed into the cool night air. My date finally urged me to come along to dinner as he was hungry. I remember wondering how he could not be enraptured and still be hungry when we had this masterpiece on which to feed. There was something that no new album by U2, no mariachi band, or even the dove-like voice of Sarah McGaughlin could capture, could not re-create. It had something to do with the preciseness, the clean notes, the creativity and inspiration, the glory of a cooperation of so many instruments thrusting toward a climatic finale that contrasted against the confusion, the dirtyness everywhere in the country, the lack of order and precision or attention to timing in hardly any aspect of life there.

Today I experienced the exact same feeling. Four years later, another continent, another third world country. I had been trying, for a couple weeks to meet a certain music teacher here to play his violin. For some reason, the longer I stay in Morocco, the more I long for my cello, to spend hours making beautiful music contrived in the depths of my soul, to practice scales for hours and finally master a few brilliant pieces from some of the celebrated creators of this glorious music, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. He brought the violin by and I shut myself away in my room, feeling a deep attachment to the instrument I never remember feeling before. I could not play that well, considering I haven’t really played a violin in more than a decade, but I remembered some old tunes, some Christmas melodies and bits of Mozart or something. Too soon I had to leave it and depart to meet someone. Later that evening the music teacher returned to retrieve his violin. I regrettably handed it over, my fingers craving my cello and wishing that to think of it would make it magically appear.

After eating dinner, bidding goodnight to the family, reading and writing for a while, I put on my headphones and got lost in Sarah Chang masterfully recreate (on violin) some pieces by Kerr and Faust, and Yo Yo Ma perform some magical orchestra-accompanied works. I shut my eyes and gloried in it. I awoke from the dream and wondered why never in the states did this music have such an affect on me. The contrast was refreshing in a way difficult to explain. That morning I had waded through sheep dung, careful not to get trampled by the livestock and the jalabba and turban-cloaked throng; shoved my way through an open-air souq, acted as a pack animal for two larger women as they bargained for a week’s worth of vegetables, swatted away flies, tripped over tarps and stones, silently watched as my host mother demanded little boys to dump vegetables on the scale into black plastic bags and hand them to her; squatted in the squalor picking through bruised specimens to find a decent carrot or mud-encrusted potato…these beautiful stories in musical prose elegantly whisked me away and suddenly it all seemed to make sense. Morocco is walking though a stage of development probably comparable to Europe a century or so ago (exceptions exist in many key technology areas such as the cell phone or internet) and the music with which Beethoven filled concert halls probably elicited similar sensations of serenity, civility, elegance, of clean, precise, beautiful notes far from their everyday worlds. I suppose that in the modern era of the New York minute, of sparklingly clean aisles and rows of fruit in modern grocery stores, Ipod shuffle that allows one person to listen to a random mix of ten thousand songs, the chance to bathe and wear pretty clothes every day, everywhere, all of these things take away some subsconscious cravings for neat, beautiful, creative, elegant, modern, and maybe, in some strange way that is a sad thing… because it means that most of humanity in the modern world miss some of the glory of classical music. It might require moving to a foreign, mysterious land like Morocco to fully appreciate some of our own musical heritage.