Rediscovering Music
Every night I am brought to a foreign world.
As I scroll nonchalantly through my Youtube feed, a great deal of “new” music shows up: they have been buried in the dust of the past, forgotten by modernity. Indeed, most of them only enjoy view numbers with three digits, never exceeding four. Their slumber has been uninterrupted for centuries, and they long to be awakened and come to light; yet since they have been abandoned by modernity, there is no wake-up call for those music and composers who have largely failed the test of time.
Incredible music played by world-class oboist Albrecht Mayer with only 853 views
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cl4XLeyMlY&list=RD0Cl4XLeyMlY&start_radio=1
Think of all the music as being keys to locked foreign worlds. In more famous works, they lead to a more crowded world, where millions awe at the beauty of the musical constructions. Thousands let their generous admiration and sometimes obsessive infatuation of the music flow out of their mouth, converge into a stream, and finally into an ocean of praise which allows the music further stand the test of time. In less famous worlds, though, the worlds remain largely uncharted, with few having ever set foot on this foreign land: and yet even fewer has found this land worth traversing, or worth just ten minutes of their time. As many leave the world, the door closes behind them; and no one is there to see the seasons change and the larks ascend. So the worlds are left behind, by the audience and by time; buried away, under a mountain of more popular works.
Yet I have just walked into them.
A certain Giuseppe Martucci, or Sergei Bortkiewicz, or Reinhard Gliere, their works rediscovered. Rediscovered in a sense that they have been published, then tucked away, then rediscovered, on this night where nothing is out of normality. Nothing special with this night, except that I have rediscovered some works thanks to the Youtube algorithm.
Have I really “rediscovered” them? Were they ever lost? The answer is clear, objectively. Of course, they were always there, never really “undiscovered”. Yet I felt like I have just dug up on a treasure; instead of listening to a Tchaikovsky concerto, here I am, listening to Martucci’s concertos, awed no less by their beauty and more regretful for the world to have long ignored them. A voice tells me that there was probably a choice by the mass, conscious or not, for them to be ignored, meant to give room to the “better” works to be heard. At some point, someone decided that they would rather listen to a new Tchaikovsky piece that they haven’t heard before than a new nobody’s piece, because he thinks that Tchaikovsky must be better, simply being Tchaikovsky himself. And that’s that. When almost everyone made that decision, being aware of it or not, those unknown works were really lost, lost in the general consciousness of the crowd, to make way for the “better” works. Hence it must be true that I have really rediscovered them, for that they were lost - by us. Thus, it is only natural that I feel regret for something lost, and that I feel the serendipity in rediscovering them.
Is that regret and serendipity justified? I try to think about why they were ignored in the first place. Is it justified that those works are abandoned by modernity? Were they really “worse” than the more popular works? Is Gerald Finzi just so much worse than Elgar that his works never see the stage-light, and is Sergei Bortkiewicz just so much worse than Rachmaninoff that his works never enter our ears? If yes, why do I keep listening to Finzi and Bortkiewicz? If no, why are their works simply not more performed and heard?
Picture that it is just an average night with a decision to click on some music to enjoy for the next two hours. You are faced with a Haydn, which you don’t remember ever hearing - you might have - but because Haydn wrote so many pieces, you couldn’t recall exactly. On the other hand, you are faced with a Fred Delius. All you know about this Fred is that he is an impressionist Englishmen. What do you think about when you make the decision to click on one of them? You recall all the Haydn you’ve heard. He’s a tireless worker with a massive output, and you have come to have your own impression on Haydn’s works. They are jolly, uplifting, crystal-clear and almost always in a major key. When you look at your choices, you are really expecting the Haydn to come along this way - jolly, uplifting, probably in C Major, a lot of sequences, nothing too tragic. But on the other hand, you know nothing about Delius’s music. You have no expectations of him, or his music.
It is time now to make a choice. You have expectations for Haydn, but not for Delius. What would you feel if the Haydn piece came contrary to your expectations? You clicked on it, looking for a piece of happiness and playfulness. If it had defied these expectations, you would have scrolled away, for that it was not what you were looking for. You were simply searching for what you imagine to be Haydn, arriving with a stereotype and impression that was formed over the years of getting to know Joseph Haydn through all of his symphonies and quartets. The beauty in twists and turns of the melody, and sometimes the minor key, would be disorienting, confusing, and sometimes outright repulsive for such a listener, precisely because they are so knowledgeable about the great father of the symphony. On the other hand, the name Delius attracts no familiarity. Its somberness could have as well been replaced by joviality and would have been acceptable purely for the merit of its melody and harmonies, free from the shackles of anticipation. A curious traveler to a foreign land, where dust has piled up and no one has been present for years, the beauty of the other world could finally be received in its purest, untouched form, separate from all previous impressions. Music, long lost, now rediscovered, found in its original state, intact, gleaming and burnished, as it has been, centuries ago. Beethoven and Haydn could really afford to wait a few minutes here and listen too to their successors, hundreds of years their junior, creating gems of wonder that they would have certainly also appreciated.
Thus emerges an argument for the attentive listener to turn deliberately toward the unfamiliar. In doing so, one is freed from the weight of precedent and expectation, able to hear without the constraints of comparison or habit. I urge for the “rediscovering” of music. The encounter becomes a form of unmediated curiosity, where the music is received on its own terms and valued for the experience it unfolds in the present moment. Is it not simply pure and wonderful to appreciate the music as such?
