Introduction

If we were to imagine Beethoven suddenly coming back to life and being confronted by one of his works [being played, he might say…], “You might want to watch what you are doing, because you are the ones who have to listen to it.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong. -Aaron Copland

Welcome to The Dr. Gradus Guide to Classical Music.

Here is Claude Debussy's “Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum,” the namesake for this guide. Debussy takes the popular exercise-book Gradus ad Parnassum and performs a bit of reverse-satire, poking fun at technical exercises by turning something dry into real art. You may select the performer using the drop-down below.

Debussy wrote, “I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it… It must never be shut in and become an academic art.”

This was the life mission of my childhood teacher, Natalie Ryshna Maynard. It would appear that it has been passed down to me.

This guide is dedicated, of course, to Natalie.

The “How to Feel” Book

Natalie’s teacher was named Olga Samaroff. Actually, she was born Lucy Hickenlooper, but for some reason didn't feel it was a name that commanded respect and decided to go by something more European. To Natalie she was known as “Madam.” (Natalie would later follow in her teacher's footsteps and change her name to Ryshna)

Madam Samaroff would tell the story of a particularly diligent concertgoer. He would get to every concert early, acquaint himself with the program booklet, and read the detailed notes as the music played.

Once, he got to the end of the program notes—or as he called it, the “how-to-feel book”—only to realize that he had turned two pages instead of one. To his great dismay, he had been “sad at the wrong time.”

Among the issues with the how-to-feel book is the fact that it's usually not even written by the composer or the performer—that is, anyone actually involved with the interpretation of the work.

One writer (Niemann) might cast the end of the Brahms Piano Quintet as “breaking off abruptly as though with bright ringing laughter.”

Meanwhile, another (Specht) would declare, “The composer's heart must have been desolate indeed when he wrote this study in black.” ^†

Samaroff quips, “Nobody seems to give much consideration to the obvious fact that if a piece of music is really gay or sad, that mood is the one thing that ought to reach the listener without explanation.”

But with all the insistence of artists that artwork needs no explanation, why is it that we, as audiences, can't restrain ourselves from reaching for expert assistance in getting closer to The Truth—whether it be tasting notes for our wine, color commentary on a football game, or program notes at the concert hall? And to some extent, isn't it presumptuous to say that would-be experts, generations removed, can strengthen the message of a Beethoven or Brahms with our verbal explanations?

Context, and a Pair of Pants

If Beethoven were alive today, I sure wouldn’t want to be the one to show him his section of the library. “Hey Ludwig, here are all the books we wrote to teach people what you meant by dun-dun-dun-DUN. Most people agree that it’s fate knocking on the door. It is fate knocking on the door, right?” You’d better hope he couldn’t hear you.

But it’s equally absurd to think that context doesn’t matter. In a previous career, I worked with the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who first introduced me to this thought experiment: You’re shown a pair of pants. Worn, tattered. Most importantly, way too small for you. How much could I sell them to you for? Ten dollars? Five?

Well, if you declined, you’re out of luck. They’re priceless, framed and featured at a museum. In fact they belonged to the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s third symphony—Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte, worn at the Battle of Waterloo. ^💬

To take it a bit further, now you’re walking through a museum, reading the notes beside every display, and you see the pants. They don’t have a note. But you’re not confused—because they’re next to Napoleon’s jacket, Napoleon’s socks, and Napoleon’s gun. You don’t think logically, “Hm, I suppose that these must therefore be the General’s pants.” Your response is intuitive. You let your mouth drop in awe and say to your friend, “Wow, he really was that short.”

Your friend might reply, without thinking, “Um, that's an [expletive] ton of blood.”

In their quest for a similarly expletive-inducing, purely instinctual reaction from classical music, Samaroff (and Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and on and on) have written books to fill in all the necessary context once and for all, aiming to do away with the how-to-feel book for good.

The problem is that these new books might teach you how to tell what year a piece was written, but without showing you any actual music, they miss the moment when your jaw drops or your blood pressure rises or you start to sob. The context only matters when it is in dialogue with a real work of art, which is trying to speak for itself. Otherwise, all the context in the world is just, shall we say, out of context.

The Solution

In his introduction to What to Listen for in Music, Copland recommends starting with a trip to listen to Bach's Well Tempered Clavier Books 1 and 2, and the nine Beethoven Symphonies—a quick detour of ten or so hours. He laments, “Some day the perfect method for illustrating a book's statement about music may be discovered. Until then, the unfortunate layman will have to accept a number of my observations on simple faith.”

85 years later, I think I may have “discovered” that method. There is, you may have noticed, music in this guide. Some of it even has commentary inline with the music.

But the core of the solution is video-as-a-first-class-citizen.

This is not just music, but spectacle.

I could show you the words from the opera that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov composed it for, analyze how György Cziffra turned it into a showpiece for pianists, and attempt (in vain) to break down Wang's finger technique. There is cultural context of the piece's use in media (from Shine, to Google Gemini ads), Guinness World Records of violinists playing it as fast as possible, and career-making takedowns from YouTubers.

But in its passion, this specific performance successfully shakes off its context—resists becoming, in Debussy's words, an academic art. The first thing you think when you watch her play, no matter whether you practice piano 40 hours a day: Oh My God How Is That Possible.

Why has this sort of visceral reaction become so distant from today's perception of Classical Music writ large? It was there in the 19th century, when Franz Liszt Fever (aka Lisztomania) was called, “a contagion that breaks out in every city our artist visits, and which neither age nor wisdom can protect.” ^† Audiences would swoon and fight over the piano strings he frequently broke.

A visceral reaction was also there in 1913, albeit less gushing, when Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring premiered to “boos, whistles, Stravinsky leaving in a rage, Nijinsky yelling out beats, Gertrude Stein watching a man smash another man’s top hat with a cane, and Florent Schmitt’s cry of 'Shut up, bitches of the seizième!'” ^†

It's easy to rattle off reasons why the response to classical music may have dampened: its cultural casting as refined and elite, its teaching via theory and analysis, and the perpetual ante-upping from new, more provocative genres of music.

None of these are unique, exactly, to our era. But ironically, it's recording—the very technology once hailed for bringing music to the masses, and the one at the core of this guide—that has accelerated classical music's emotional flattening in our lifetimes.

The Life and Death of Classical Music

OK, reports of the death of classical music have been greatly exaggerated—some say it's our oldest continuing tradition.^† But it's important to think about how exactly recording backfired so we can restore the intuitive response to the same level as the intellectual response.

Today we listen in the background as we work, or drive, or eat, or cook. To most classical composers in history, this would be absolutely alien. Imagine Beethoven taking a peek at a 21st-century student sitting in a dorm room with AirPods in, doing math homework, and listening to a compilation of all Beethoven's calmest music picked out from the symphonies and sonatas to avoid the storms and stress.

We might focus momentarily on our car's GPS, and when we come back to the music, we find ourselves lost in a 40-minute sea of sound. The jump scares and the sudden retreats that act as signposts are flattened in our earbuds.

We no longer visualize a pianist's fingers dancing across the keyboard, the sweat dripping from the conductor's mane. We can lose track entirely of the real person on the other side of our speakers, pouring their heart out in search of connection. ^💬

In Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a violinist is critiqued, “She played Beethoven as if he had never been alive.” Sometimes we listen to Beethoven that way, too.

There are consequences to this disconnect from the physical act of performance. Sound, alive and mortal, is converted into artifact. It breaks the human chain from composer to musicians to listener; the music floats in isolation.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein once said, “I want to risk, to dare… That way the music can bloom anew. It's like making love. The act is always the same, but each time it's different.”

It is the performer's stark vulnerability—the rawness of a real human being—that binds audience and performer together in the present moment.

As such, here is the philosophy for this guide, designed to enable the music to shine on every level—to live alongside its context, drop it, or embrace it.

1. Video over audio. I choose video as much as possible to preserve a connection to the life behind the music. If you're walking or driving as you listen, try to find a safe moment later on to watch a bit of video. Similarly, the music is as important as the text—this guide is as much a curation of music as it is a commentary on it. If you're reading in a place with a poor internet connection, you can use the bookmark button on the videos and come back to them later in your watchlist.
2. Prioritize the first listen. Classical music how-to guides usually emphasize discovery via repeated listening to a piece. Recordings have enabled this. I am more interested in the first time we encounter a performance. There is an honesty in the moment when you don't know what's coming next. And for what it's worth, Beethoven's audiences often heard a symphony only once in their whole lives.
3. The performance, not the piece, is the primary unit. Even when we discuss a piece more generally, all our experience is based in a specific performance. Occasionally, the guide has switchers, like at the beginning of this chapter, where you can compare different performances. You can always find more online.
4. Trust your gut. You won't like everything in the guide. Good. I cast a wide net with the repertoire selection. I am a pianist, cellist, and conductor—and the music I play and love is well represented, but there's also a lot of music that I have just discovered. Sometimes you will suffer through my own performances.
   
   Unlike most guides, this one also includes some music from outside the previous century's canon. Be open-minded; even the most seasoned tastes can change. This is not a comprehensive reference, but do not fear, the classics are well-represented.

Finally: classical music is by nature an ephemeral art form, composed without a fast forward or pause button, and live music is still the ideal. If this guide only gets you to do one thing, go to a concert. The more time spent with live music, the more effective you'll find recordings.

Pocket Concert

I'd like to share a performance that was one of my favorite first listens—a 2010 TED talk from conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra from Venezuela that won me over before I knew anything about their story.

Here's the first “Pocket Concert” segment of the guide, a complete movement (section) of music, this one four-minutes long, best enjoyed immersively, with headphones and in landscape mode. You'll also notice that you can click the ⓘ for the YouTube description and comments.

These are optional segments, and you can always use the bookmark icon to save the video and come back later.

The skill level is incredible for high school students, yes. But it's the hot-blooded passion that won me over. It's the fire in the eyes of the violinists—barely able to stay in their seats—that made me want to root for them, to grab an instrument and be on their team. And that makes this playing frankly more exciting than many professional orchestras.

This music from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony is not dainty, demure classical music to put you to sleep, but something that riles you up.

Then, in their second selection, something much brighter: here are just the last couple of minutes, now in their Venezuelan colors.

That was Danzón No. 2 by Arturo Márquez. Many years after hearing this recording, I finally performed this piece, first as a pianist in the orchestra and then later as a conductor, and all I could think about was how much fun these kids had playing it and how much joy it brought to me as a listener.

It's also interesting that the backstory of the students, not the music, was the reason they had this TED Talk platform. Known as El Sistema, the Venezuelan education program was described as “free classical music education… for impoverished children.” Their top orchestra has performed far beyond what most observers of the U.S. public music education system would ever have predicted. But this context isn't necessary to enjoy it—the music speaks for itself.

What Comes Next

Excellent texts abound regarding the history, theory, and context of classical music. This guide is about shedding it. So we will begin with concrete music and get progressively more abstract, delegating more and more to the intuition as we go.

In Stories for the Eyes and Ears, we’ll start with music that depicts real life, like soundtracks and staged productions, and see how it’s really not so different from its plot-less counterparts. This music has titles like “Romeo and Juliet.”

In For Your Ears Only, we’ll drop the visuals but keep the story, expanding the range of listener interpretation to fill in the story as we see fit. This music has titles like Clair de lune (“Moonlight”).

In Between the Ears, we’ll encounter the truly abstract—pieces just called Piano Sonata Op. 111—and see if the music can take on a life of its own due to—or in spite of—the fleeting context meted out by their oft-cryptic titles.

We’ll conclude with For Heart and Spirit—music made great only by dint of a listener’s willingness to trust their intuitive response with all their being.

But first, let’s conclude Part I with a glimpse of where we’re going: an intuitive understanding of music and our own responses.