Introduction

I am an amateur pianist, cellist, and conductor. I say amateur in the best way, in its original meaning as “one who loves”.

This love was passed on to me by my childhood teacher, Natalie Ryshna Maynard, whom you met in the previous chapter. A formidable pianist and lifelong educator, Natalie believed that classical music should belong to everyone. It is an abstract art that more than any other hinges on the personal interpretations of its performers and listeners. This book is designed to help listeners develop, deepen, and trust their own musical intuitions by finding a way into the music that speaks to them. It is, of course, dedicated to Natalie.

The “How to Feel” Book

In the early twentieth century, a pianist named Lucy Hickenlooper from San Antonio, Texas changed her name to Olga Samaroff so that people would take her seriously. Decades later, when Samaroff was teaching at the newly formed Juilliard School, her student Natalie Hook would change her last name to Ryshna and model herself in her teacher's image.

There is much one could say about “Madam” Samaroff, from her invention of blind auditions — a process now standard among symphony orchestras to combat bias in hiring — to her discovery of (and later marriage to) Philadelphia Orchestra and Disney Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski.^💬 But I introduce her for the course and book she developed called The Layman's Music Book. It is from this book that I want to share one of my favorite examples of subjective interpretation in music, two scholars that she selects writing about the coda from the Brahms Piano Quintet (italics hers).

Niemann writes: "The coda goes laughing by till it is finally concentrated still more drastically by means of syncopations. Yet all this does not succeed in checking its joyful mood; and, in the concluding lines, it takes its leave by breaking off abruptly as though with bright ringing laughter."

Meanwhile, Specht writes: "The extensive coda… dashes towards the dark unknown. The composer's heart must have been desolate indeed when he wrote this study in black."

Samaroff concludes: “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.” She relates the tale of one concertgoer who would religiously read the program notes during concerts, or as he called it, the “how-to-feel book.” Once, he turned over two pages instead of one and was later dismayed to find that he was “sad at the wrong time.”

Instead of explaining how to feel, this Dr. Gradus Guide presents multiple different ways to approach classical music. Among others, we will explore the behind-the-scenes work of students and performers, the intellectual elegance of musical architecture, and the pursuit of the spiritual.

The largest section revolves around musical storytelling, which includes a tour of the repertoire. It starts with music that tells concrete stories before venturing into more abstract territory. By the time we reach pieces simply titled “Symphony”, readers will have developed an intuition for what the music is trying to say and how it speaks to them. And yes, there is also a Top 40 listening guide to the classical canon.

My teacher and my teacher's teacher were particularly proud that their students had diverse approaches to the same music.^💬 They found the style and repertoire that spoke to their students as individuals, unlocking their personal lenses of interpretation. I think the same can be done for listeners. My hope is that by the end of this book, both new and experienced listeners will have found a new way to connect with classical music for themselves and be empowered to lead their own musical journeys without anyone telling them how to feel.

This platform

As I started writing, I quickly realized that for this to work, there would have to be a way to actually experience the music. In 1938, composer Aaron Copland wrote in his book, What to Listen for in Music, “No solution has been found for the perennial problem of supplying satisfactory musical examples…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” a solution. The videos in this book are embedded in-line and should generally be treated as “foreground” content, actively engaged with like the text. Occasionally, the beginnings of chapters will have background-able listening, and there will be supplementary videos in links, which will play in-app. Chapters will conclude with some recommended Spotify links. If you have any trouble, please send feedback using the “…” menu in the bottom right corner.

The recordings dilemma

Recordings have changed the way we consume all music, but especially classical music, of which so much was written before the idea of a “recording” even existed. Samaroff hailed recordings as doing “what the art of printing did for literature” for the way they increased access to the music. But this century, audio recordings have become the primary rather than the supplementary way that music is consumed, and I'm afraid that classical music barely survived that transition.

To start with, there are technical considerations. Almost all classical music leans on dynamics (volume) to shape its narratives and build to its most powerful moments. In the days of vinyl, these extreme changes would even throw the needle out of place; today classical music's jump scares are greatly compressed to save our eardrums. More modern genres have largely foregone the use of dynamics so that the entire track would stay loud and easy to hear in all environments.

Today we listen in the background as we work, or drive, or eat, or cook. When we do so, we no longer visualize the concert halls, the keys flying across the keyboards, the energy emanating from the stage. We can forget entirely that there is a real person on the other side of the speakers trying to connect with us.

This disconnect from the physical performance has consequences. Take virtuosity, for instance. Tchaikovsky's climax of impossibly fast octaves would not be nearly as exciting to listen to if we couldn't see or imagine the blur of the pianist's hands as they dive into their narrow black and white targets at breakneck speed and with enough power to match a full orchestra.

Here's one minute of a fearless Yuja Wang as she was beginning to explode into classical music superstardom, playing an octave passage from “Flight of the Bumblebee”. While Rimsky-Korsakov's original orchestral version was written to imitate a whirling bumblebee, here it is arranged as a virtuoso showpiece by György Cziffra. Wang uses it as an encore to give the audience a little dessert. ^💬

Concerts which doubled as spectacle, as Wang's often do, were not inventions of rock and pop. At least as far back as the 19th century, audiences swooned at Franz Liszt's performances and fought over the piano strings he frequently broke, a phenomenon dubbed Lisztomania. Natalie used to say that her favorite pianist, Vladimir Horowitz, was so exciting to watch not because his playing was so in control, but because he was always right on the verge of losing control. It is the performer's stark vulnerability — the rawness of a real human being — that binds audience and performer together in the present moment.

I have tried to select videos rather than audio in order to simulate a concert as much as possible. Headphones will greatly enhance the immersive experience. But classical music is by nature an ephemeral art form, without a fast forward or pause button, and live music is still the ideal. My hope is that these videos will inspire readers to go seek out live performances. And the more time spent with live music, the more effective the recordings will be at evoking the full impact of the performance.

If I were to provide a single piece of guidance, I would recommend going to as small a venue as possible, where the connection between performer and audience is at its most intimate.^💬 The Schubertiades of old were held in living rooms, a tradition that is still effective today.

Moritz von Schwind's 1868 drawing of a Schubertiade

Listening philosophy

This book primarily discusses the first listen — how to approach a piece of music that the listener has never heard before, with little or no context. This is, to state the obvious, how we all originally got in to classical music — by hearing it once for the first time. Still, it's easy to forget that many listeners today have heard Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” more times than Beethoven himself. ^💬 He could never have imagined that someone could listen to them “on loop.”

Classical music certainly rewards repeated listening, and occasionally we'll see multiple interpretations of the same piece, but those listens tend to get easier every time. So as we go through various pieces of music, most discussion will be about the one or two things that jump out the most. I try to be objective, but my interpretations will always be filtered through the lens of my own experience, and are not the capital-T Truth.

Now I'd like to share one of my first “first listens” that made an impression on me, courtesy of a 2010 TED talk from conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra from Venezuela.

Here's four minutes of music.

At this point, my teenage mind was blown. 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 violins — barely able to stay in their seats — that made me want to root for them, to 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. It was not an emotion I was used to feeling. And then in their second selection, something on the opposite end of the spectrum: here are the last five minutes, in their Venezuelan colors.

That was Danzon No. 2 by Arturo Marquez. Note: I've done my best to excerpt these videos to still get the point across without destroying the integrity of the music. The video will stop at the end of the excerpt, but that doesn't mean you have to stop listening there! If you enjoy it, just go back and hit play or rewind again on the bottom control bar.

Now I hope you see why the music is the real heart of this book, not the words. There's so much I could write about this performance — the amount of pure fun this is to watch and listen to it — the fact that I had never even heard of the composer Arturo Marquez, or even much Latin American classical music before this — but I'm hoping that many of you discovered the same sense of awe that this performance still brings me.

It's also interesting to think that the history of this orchestra, not the music, is the reason that it was playing in this venue to this audience. Known as El Sistema, the Venezuelan program was described as “free classical music education…for impoverished children.” Their top orchestra has far outperformed what most products of the U.S. public music education system would ever have predicted. But this context isn't necessary to enjoy it — the music can still speak for itself.

In choosing the music for this book, I've cast a wide net. Not every piece or performer will be for every listener. Some of it may be familiar, but some of it was even unfamiliar to me until I discovered it in my research for this book. I can't wait to share more of it with you.