Music is an experiment in the most abstract of all the arts.

This morning I woke with a compelling desire to listen to Samuel Barber’s “Overture to the School for Scandal”. Even before dressing I put the CD on, loud. Then let the sounds permeate the cabin as I built a fire, washed my face and made tea. As the water boiled I sat on the floor in front of the fire watching the flames start their burn and thought not of what the sounds represent, but what the sounds are, not looking for words to explain them, but accepting them as absolute.
So few people I know have the gift of accepting 20th Century orchestral music. I remember the struggle I first had with Stravinsky and Shostakovich, Poulanc and Rachmaninoff. But after a few listens I began to recognize the patterns, to transcend the search for an easy-to-whistle, catchy melody, to not be overwhelmed by the dissonances, to find rhythms unlike what we are accustomed to in more popular music. But what attracted me most was how the elements of melody, harmony and rhythm combine for a newness of listening. How these sounds are fresh and enlightening, a break from the 4/4 rhythm and three chord songs on the radio. When people tell me they can’t get it, I think of how difficult it must have been for postclassical Parisians to accept the radical art of the impressionists. Didn’t Manet’s “Olympia” shock the public as much as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”? Didn’t the unenlightened critics dismissed Van Gogh’s use of thick paints and distorted light as a manifestation of insanity.
The same is true in music as it is in the visual arts. Often we dismiss what we don’t understand, or we try to make it conform to our own (often limited) view, and when we realize it will not conform we reject it and return to our comfortable world of the familiar.
Remember the shock of Jimmy Hendricks’ “Purple Haze” or “Star Spangled Banner”, when you first heard it, how you could not classify his work, how you had a time trying to understand what he was trying to do? But now after subsequent listenings his music has become increasingly comfortable and familiar and now with each play it still brings that rich and satisfying smile of enlightenment.