Okay. First off, let me clarify one point. I do not understand Latin. I never even took it in High School. Although I did take Spanish, the cognates are limited and I cannot claim to be able to decipher most Latin phrases. I mean, I can figure out what "lux aeterna" means, but that's the extent of it. So, the point I'm making, I think, has nothing to do with language or text, but, rather, entirely with music.
Frequent readers of E.C. know that I generally use my iPod only at the gym and when there, it is usually full of pop music. [ed note: See From Bach to Gaga and Lady Gaga's been bumped off my iPod by Athena Reich] This week I decided to try something new. I emptied my little device and filled it with one thiing only: Mozart's Requiem.
See, I'd started to wonder if I might actually be inspired to cycle faster on the cardio equipment if I was listening to music that moved me more deeply, music with longer phrases and more complex harmonic progressions, i.e. something from the realm we sometimes call "classical" or "serious" or "concert" music.
Generally speaking, my experiment seemed to prove the point. I worked up more of a sweat and even found myself air conducting for a nano-second before I remembered there were other people in the cardio room. But here's the fascinating thing. As I toweled off and prepared to exit the gym, I reached that point between the water fountain and the stairs where I usually wipe down my iPod and headphones with the towel I'm about to toss into a bin.
Today, instead, I couldn't stop listening. I was in the middle of the Finale to the entire piece and the music was building to such great effect that I tossed the towel in the bin and continued out into the street and all the way home to my apartment building until the final cadence filled my ears.
I think this quality is unique to this kind of music, music that one of my professors once described as the sort that "demands our attention with its sudden shifts in tone or feeling." It never dawns on me to let a Lady Gaga tune play out to the final cadence because that final cadence is just one of six or seven that have already been heard in precisely the same way. Not so for classical music.
Here's an odd question. In our rapidly fragmenting world, in which we live our lives in fits and starts, to which the iPod, with it's easy-on-easy-off buttons is best suited, will classical, baroque and romantic era musics fade further into the background? Simply because we no longer have the time to hear a full movement through to its completion?
I hope not.
