by Greg D'Alessio
Pop open a jewel box and pry out a CD—say it’s a recent recording of Mozart String Quartets—and stop for a moment before you hit “play” to consider how strange a thing it is that’s about to happen. Music will flood into your room. If you closed your eyes and held your nose, tried to forget the feel of the clothes on your body or the chair that you sit in, the experience you will have is, adjusting for particularities of performance, exactly the same experience you would have had at any of the thousands of other enactments of these pieces stretching all the way back to 1780-something, when the first might have included Mozart and Hadyn on violin or viola.
Think also of all the other human beings between that time and yours and how they too heard these same notes in the same succession as you are about to. This experience—repeated so many times in so many circumstances—the “Mozart String Quartet” experience, is a kind of museum of human consciousness. A half hour slice of time shared with thousands upon thousands of people you will never know, but along with whom you have sat and heard this music. An experience shared, even though no other event nor any other object might exist in common between you and random fellow audients: an Italian leather merchant from 1822, a Brazilian industrialist from 1890, a poet in pre-Revolutionary Shiang Hai, and a young music appreciation student in Indianapolis in 1953—all of you utterly different and separate from one another—except for the Mozart. It is, as I’ve said, a strange thing.
I called music a museum of consciousness and it’s worth remarking on, this similarity of (specifically “classical”) music and the institution of the museum. They have the same sense of collecting and preserving the best of the ages, of providing continuity and a pivot point of sorts around which the fluctuations of culture and history can turn. They also share, perhaps because of this role, a kind of reverence and awe, a feeling of vanished perfection. Yet there is a subtle distinction. In looking at a painting, or artifact one is always aware of the distance in time your own life has from the thing you are looking at—top hats on the men, plumes, people riding horses, etc. You are always aware that the people represented by the objects in a museum are ultimately and unbridgeably separate from your own existence.
In the act of listening, however, there is no way to feel the joy of Mozart as old joy, or someone else’s joy. It's yours; you feel it live, in real time—just as every other person who has experienced the same piece has felt it. This makes music personal, individual and yet, as we have seen, communal in a way that anything so specific and situated in its own time as a painting or pottery shard cannot ever match. Music has more in common with a séance or a time machine. It is as though the air of Vienna in 1787, with all its attributes—smells of wig powder, body odor, floor polish, animal glues, horse manure, snuff, sunlight through coal smoke, pollen from plants no longer growing—were sealed up in a room: an ambered slice of actual existence which we can, for a little while, inhabit as if it were our own. With music, we are as close to being there, in that time, as we can be in life.
So as you hit play, and the music floods the room, give some thought to this miracle, this distillation of the world as it should be, this intimate communion with the minds of people dead many decades, gone and yet as alive and close to us as if they were sitting in the chair next to us, because its our best inheritance, and one of the few causes for real hope. Then stop thinking of all that, and listen.
