I am often asked (especially by people my own age) why I love classical music so much. Apparently, it’s strange for someone in her 20s to have a passion for something so…well…old and stuffy, something grandparents listen to. There are the obvious reasons, of course: I was raised listening to classical music; I started learning music itself at a very young age, classical included. It has always been a part of my life and I can’t imagine it otherwise. While these are both important factors, the obvious does not really touch upon why I hold this kind above all other types of musical expression.
I won’t trouble you, readers, with a lot of very fine prose concerning all of the minutiae in my musical love: there is nothing in 2000 words that will make you understand it any better than 500 can. There is a scene in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (one of my favorite musically-themed movies of all time) where Mr. Holland is explaining how Beethoven’s deafness, given his profession, was unthinkable. In the background, there is a record playing the second movement to Beethoven’s 7th symphony. As Mr. Holland explains why Beethoven’s situation was so devastating, the music builds and builds, almost as if in slow desperation–perhaps the desperation of the composer himself. It ends with a gruff and tearful Mr. Holland clarifying how the man could have composed at all because of his hearing loss (he wasn’t born deaf) and we know it’s a stark contrast to the teacher’s little son, who we recently learned, like Beethoven, is also deaf (he was born that way). The movement, at that very moment, explodes into emotion: joy, despair, ecstasy, passion, tragedy, all of it, all so seamlessly intertwined that they exist only as one, rather than many. It tears at me, it gnaws so terribly and yet…I am filled with a hope and a love I do not really understand. The music, at that point, has moved beyond a sensory experience and into the realm of the physical; it imbues. If Beethoven was alive to explain it, he would have no need. It speaks, and it says more than any one could possibly hope to say in a lifetime.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of music.
