Every once in a while, someone manages to articulate a particularly compelling version of the essential power of classical music to connect with the human soul.
The best I’ve seen lately came from the computer keyboard of iconoclastic British pianist James Rhodes, writing for the Guardian’s music blog in response to the annual Gramophone Awards this week.
Rhodes’s rant is equal parts love and hate, so beautifully encapsulating how so many of us relate to all of life’s unavoidables and essentials.
You can read the full piece here. The paragraph that connected with me was:
EM Forster wrote that a Beethoven symphony was “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated the ear of man“. Goethe called architecture “frozen music”. Classical music has been around for centuries because it has an unceasing, infallible and soul-shattering ability to take all of us on a journey of self-discovery and improvement in a world where most other means of doing so seem to involve either Simon Cowell or Deepak Chopra. It is a right, not a luxury, and, at the risk of sounding like a haughty middle-class mother at a children’s birthday party, the industry behind it is ruining it for the rest of us.
The intractability, messiness and dithering of the “industry” is, for better or worse, an essential part of the game — just like it is in major-league sports, or health care or (shudder) the Toronto Transit Commission.
Life — and music — flourish regardless.
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Here, as a little aside, is a great little video vignette featuring a piano, Beethoven’s Emperor, Frédéric Chopin, Rhodes and Benedict Cumberbatch:
John Terauds