As children, many of us were forced to bang out a few chords on the piano or strangle a tune out of a recorder. But beyond this rudimentary training, many of us find classical music irrelevant to our post-modern era. One often hears the argument that classical music is not accessible: If you don’t understand the musical language, supposedly classical music is only a jumble of sound, like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.
This, quite simply, is hooey.
We are trained by our instant-satisfaction culture to expect simplicity in our movies, our music, and our literature. And it is an undeniable fact that classical music revels in the complex – Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the piece the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra performed on Friday, lasts over an hour and contains only a few recognizable melodies. Even for musicians, it is hard to identify what Mahler is doing moment to moment. But the structure, the melodies, even the notes here are not the point. The searing, seething emotion in each line is more important, reaching out to one and all, compelling, commanding us to feel the same.
The dense, passionate landscape Mahler creates is particularly vivid in the first movement, in which the instruments sing out with as much passion and unpredictability as a teenage girl, but much more sweetly. It does not matter if you cannot follow each line of music, because like the arguments the teeny-bopper makes for going to the mall, they aren’t as notable for their logic or language, but the fervor fueling them.
After this staggering introduction, the orchestra successfully navigated through the three interconnected middle movements, in which the focus ricochets to almost every instrument of the orchestra, highlighting unusual and underappreciated elements, such as the inclusion of a mandolin and a guitar and even letting the string bass take the theme.
After this melodic deconstruction, Mahler slowly weaves the disparate parts together, building up to the monumental finish of the fifth movement. Even if you have no prior training, you don’t have to be told that the solos of the principal trumpet (Bryant Millet) or euphonium (Evan Kelsick, in the first movement) are stunning, or how sensually concertmaster Tara Lynn Ramsey shapes a line of music. It is a question of feeling, not of training, and these individuals bare their hearts to the listener as openly as Amy Winehouse.
This piece was perhaps a slightly ambitious choice for this orchestra. At times they struggled to maintain balance among themselves, and while the players were technically proficient enough to perform the (terrifically difficult) notes on the page, one sometimes felt they did not have the emotional elasticity or intensity to convey the power behind the notes. In the pounding opening to the final movement, for example, one felt shoved against an angry inflexible wall of sound rather than enveloped by lush layers of music. But at several points, notably in the turbulent first movement and the tricky fourth movement, the orchestra produced a unified sound as edgy and emotionally charged as Adele or Cee-Lo today. One can see why conductor Victor Yampolsky, in his introductory comments, called this a piece essential to teaching a musician his civic duty: The players must not only be able to play a beautiful independent line, but to unite into a cohesive whole. If we’d take a page out of Mahler’s book and let him stretch not only our emotions but our ideas of community, maybe there would be less doubt about the relevance of classical music, even to students humming “TiK ToK” on the street.
