Periodic fascination

It's happening again, right this very moment, as the last of the chorus of the "Selig sind die toten" (Blessed are the dead) movent of Ein Deutsches Requiem plays out.

I am again sinking into a classical music only diet. It seems to happen every 18 months or so.

A cleansing of the palette, as it were.

I've been inundated with clever, "soulful", music for the past 6 months, and none of it really hits the spot. Not one track of it is remotely transcendent of the human condition. It is pop (or aspires to be, or pretends to be at odds with), and it will be forgotten before the turn of the next decade.

Why?

Because it's disposable. It's candy. It says nothing important, and so it is not important.

So what do a bunch dead old white dudes have to say about contemporary life and all it's travails?

Fuck all.

Modern life is rubbish, which is why most of us hate our lives, or aspects of our lives. We traded in meaning for safety. Comfort for passion. Quality for quantity. The ultimate Benthamian nightmare is everywhere you look in the post industrial world. We know this, and are powerless to stop it. We're fucking idiots, and too smart for our own good at the same time.

Why then does classical music endure?

Fuck if I know. Craftsmanship? The amount of talent involved to play instruments which other talented hands formed from disparate substances of metal, wood, and animal byproducts absolutely boggles the mind.

Yes but why?

I wrote of transcendence, in the context that modern music largely lacks that quality. And when that thought occurred to me, I had in mind moments of musical sublimity (the adagio sostenuto of Rachmaninovs 2nd piano concerto), despair tempered with a kind of brave joy (as in Den Alles fleisch es ist wie gras from the very same Requiem by Brahms I mentioned earlier), and monstrosity (as in the Alegretto of Shostakovic's Leningrad symphony, or "The Isle of the Dead", again by Rachmaninov), absolute abandon (as in Straus II's "Pertuum Mobile", written so that rich white people could delight in their youth, lost or reproduced) nostalgia (as in the Adagio un poco mosso of Bethovens "Emperor" piano concerto, the piece of music I want played at my funeral).

Yes, these can be found in modern music as well, but that doesn't mean you would ever compare a quarter pounder with cheese to a Chateaubriand, unless you would, in which case, I surrender. I shall return to my listening delight.

Yes it's pretentious, but since I'm better than you, I am simply doing what comes naturally to me, which is to listen to music that blows the fucking doors off, and windows out, of everything made today.

But wait a second.

How the hell can you listen to Brahms, and Chopin, and Mendelssohn, and all those other amazing mother fuckers on the train/bus/skateboard/bike?

Ah shit. It's all house shoe music...

Whatever.