“So” she seethed. “You really do know everything don’t you?”

I have to say that I was touched by her assessment of my intellectual ability even if I did think that she was overestimating it a bit. I mean to know absolutely everything is indeed a tall order.

The more I thought about it though, the more I doubted that she had meant this to be a compliment. Something in the tone of voice just did not sound right.

In fact, as she continued, her invective became sharper and more strident. I could not help but think of all the words that begin with S that describe how a female can deliver a tongue lashing: seething, scathing, shouting, screaming, scolding, or simmering with rage. It is as if the poor letter S had been especially developed to convey female displeasure.

She did raise an interesting point though. What if I did know everything? And if not everything, then maybe most things? This was not the first time I had heard this from a female and I was starting to wonder what their point was…

It was a fun idea though. If, for example, I did know most things then maybe I could do something I had never tried before…like be a music critic and reviewer. Not just something for the New York Times with its cerebral coverage of symphonies, operas, and other performances of the exquisite taste, but for any musical publication. Even though music itself might be spread across a wide canvas of creativity, surely the language to describe it must be similar?

Sadly, music reviews have historically been inaccessible in terms not only of what they are describing, but also how they are describing it—in other words, they are laden with a language and grammar that is beyond the average person. The music critic wonders off into a linguistic universe where the actual music seems to play just a secondary or tertiary role.  In the past, too many reviewers felt obligated to deconstruct songs, movements, and the artist in the most dolled up and intricate linguistic foppery imaginable. Take this example: Brody on the Beatles

Now what in the blazes does any of that essay mean? Frankly, I have no idea even though I have read it a few times. I had naïvely thought the Beatles were simply four abundantly talented lads from Liverpool who were having a whale of a time making music and seeing where it would lead. At least with food or wine reviews the bottom line is, and please excuse my vulgarity here, if a plate of chow “eats good” or a glass “drinks good.” Why is there not an equal standard for music? Why make it so hard for us average folk to be let in on the secret of the Pipes of Pan?

Obviously, this simple test of goodness does not always carry over to writing about music. I understand that musical performers and reviewers sometimes need rather robust technical terms in order to speak intelligently about a musical work—that is fine. Reviewers like Brody, however, all too often waft into vaporous prose—as if such inanity is somehow a prerequisite of musical reviewing.

As for me? Well, I noticeably lack music ability of any sort—either vocal or instrumental. I sat last chair in trombone in both Middle and High School. It was embarrassing and I know the conductors wanted to boot me from the program but relented only under pressure of my parents not to do so.

From this I carried a love-hate relationship with music. At times I actually can admire the linguistic finery of musical reviews—as if it is all a first-rate gag even if I am not quite in on the joke.

Yet as an average gent I am also deeply unsettled by it. Why? Because it seems so excessively exclusionary. Instead of teaching the reader something, musical reviewers speak in a coded way that seems designed to keep us from joining the club… even if it is not a club that I would really be interested in joining in the first place.

Again, music can be complex and thus demands a precise and descriptive language. No one is asking to make something as sublime as music into a third-grade reader. Emotion, precision, evocation, etc. require more than a 250-word vocabulary to describe. But where is the balance?

Here I draw a parallel from 16th century Swiss/French theology. Around the 1530s the Frenchman Jean Calvin began to vigorously teach the idea that God predestined some for salvation (the elect in the topic’s parlance) and others for eternal damnation. By doing so, he implicitly raised the question of man’s free will in the matter of salvation—an unsolvable problem indeed. Put bluntly, it boils down to this: thank you for playing, but the decision has already been made as to what is going to happen to you.

Music discussions have this strain of Calvinistic determinism. No matter how hard I might wish to understand musical depths, textures, and phraseology, I feel as if Monsieur Calvin is reminding me that I have not been elected. My musical fate was sealed at birth. Frightening is it not? What else might I have been banished from in life? If music, as many contend, is indeed an idiom for life then perhaps I have missed it all! It is one thing to be average but this is something completely different!

I was reminded of this eternal banishment when, with nose to the window and gazing in from the outside, I used to tune into a public radio program called Saint Paul Sunday. Hosted by Bill McGlauglin, this aural cornucopia of classical artists was a staple on the airways for nearly three decades. Even if the music was not always the most melodious, the conversation and language were entrancing with their magnetic draw to other-worldliness. After all, things like hexachordal combinatoriality (Combinatoriality) and Arnold Schoenberg’s Twelve-tone compositions (Schoenberg) are fortunately not things that one runs across every day as they must be taken in very small bites.

One Sunday in particular, I remember Bill and his guest were creased over in amusement at a certain composer’s mischievous shift of key in the middle of a complex score. Their peals of laughter reinforced how I was missing the joke. I thought that this brand of humor must be like Dmitri Shostakovich’s mother telling him that there will be no dessert if he is going to be such naughty boy and shift the key again in his musical compositions—a real knee-slapper indeed.

Where then do I and my fellow musical philistines fit in? Does Calvin’s conception of the game even exclude us from just hearing and enjoying? Admittedly we did not scamper off to graduate school to live in poorly heated apartments in order to afford scintillating lectures on Liszt, Schuman, and the other greats of the musical realm, but can’t we opine on what sounds good to us?

Now I know that the word popular gives musical sophisticates the vapours. Music with a good dance beat does not have the boxy chord and melodic structures, repetitive phrasing, and tendentious thematic development that the elites seem to enjoy so much. Well, to them I would remind them of the words of Duke Ellington: It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

This, however, is not to set the classical canon against popular music—or jazz, or the blues, or a hundred other variations of melody making. Just because it ain’t got that swing is sort of like saying that Shakespeare’s works did not have the same “whodunit” factor of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle or the biographical chops of David McCullough. We do not compare them because they are simply not made for comparison.

We also know that a bit of preparation—some spadework—is crucial to understanding the higher arts. Just look how much more accessible Shakespeare’s plays are when you know the plot and characters before setting out to the theater. The same is true for music—no matter what the genre.

Even then, however, we know that a lot of music can be… shall we delicately say… challenging. Music like this needs not just spadework but rather some very heavy plowing with the largest John Deere tractor in the barn to understand. Unfortunately, reviews often add the need for additional plowing. Instead of enhancing appreciation they detract from it with that whiff of exclusion.

In mythology it was Zeus’ daughter Euterpe who was the goddess of music. She has allowed great musicians to bring the fire of the heavens, the muse, to mere mortals. Euterpe, I am quite certain, would not care if one wore cowboy boots or black tie while making music as she knew that musicianship is as much a sonic attitude of talent, competence, and innovation.

So if the furious female I mentioned earlier were right and I knew everything could I then do a better job of writing about music? Well, I could try so here is a quick crack at it:

Juxtaposed in the photos below is the aforementioned Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and Mr. Jimmy Page. Schoenberg of the inscrutable twelve-tone composition and Page as the former guitarist of that dulcet (well, maybe not exactly dulcet) rock quartet Led Zeppelin.

Although their music bears no comparison we do see some commonalities—commonalities that invite us in for a closer look. We see both artists beavering away at crafting music. Both are willfully ignoring health guidelines regarding the use of tobacco products. Most inadvisable indeed, but such was the kinship of musicians back in the day. Maybe there are other areas of overlapping interest. After all, musicians borrow not just smokes from each other, but also snippets from all parts of the tonal spectrum.

Second: There are also opposites. Schoenberg oozes gravitas while Page is oozing a genuine joie de vivre. The serious Schoenberg spent time with different forms and structures of tonality while Page wrote about bad women, disreputable behavior, and marauding Vikings.

Third: Schoenberg is said to have “wrestled” with his revolution in music and was even “troubled” regarding its implications. While this trouble might have been Schoenberg’s driving muse, it certainly was not Page’s. He was not troubled at all—instead, he was trouble. We see evidence of this in the picture below in which he is nipping at a sample of the South’s bourbon.

Skill, talent, hours of writing, practicing, performing, and learning. Music is hard enough for even the gifted artist to master so why should we also expect that it is laden with deep layers of meaning? The film producer Samuel Goldwyn was once asked about what kind of messages he wished for his films to convey. “Message?” Goldwyn snorted. “If you want to send a message use Western Union!” Reviewers should not assume that every song, every passage, every stanza has some meaning or message other than what they are—a rich and beautiful experiment in sound. Music can hold its own—sometimes we should just let it.

In closing I must give credit, however, to Schoenberg for one of the great comebacks of all time—and not just in musical lore. Schoenberg was serving on the German side in the First World War at the ripe old age of 42—far past the age for being an eager young recruit. When a superior officer once asked if he was “this notorious Schoenberg,” referring with obvious disdain to what Schoenberg was doing to music, Schoenberg did not hesitate in replying: “Sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, and so I let it be me.”

Keep being average!