And you thought music was just music.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud may or may not have said. But music is often sex.
Music is sex in a gently sublimated form. It’s intellectualized and disguised and sometimes rubbed the wrong way, but all forms of music almost always lead to some kind of climax or resolution.
Even a simple little ditty is a diddly.
Conductor Herbert von Karajan, he of Nazi Party fame and controversy, felt all kinds of things about the stringed armies he led and the music they produced. His best biographer, Richard Osborne, mentions in passing that von Karajan thought that music was sexual, and, beyond a doubt, sensual in nature, not just mere high-class entertainment.
American philosopher Allan Bloom, in his magisterial bestseller THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, is even more explicit about sex and music.
” . . . rock music has one appeal only,” Bloom says, “a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”
How to reach mature love and, indeed, even eros, a refined, elite, patient foreplay?
Bloom prescribes classical music.
Why classical? Because it demands patience, work, time, and trouble. Because it forces listeners to listen attentively or else to fall asleep and fart loudly in a large concert hall. Because classical music tends to really, really build to a climax.
That building, that complex admixture of boredom and excitement, is just like sexual foreplay. Long, fun foreplay, once you have the patience to master and enjoy it.
Herbert von Karajan loved conducting Ravel’s BOLERO because, as Bloom says, it’s the “one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked (by young people).” But von Karajan didn’t make a steady diet of BOLERO. He didn’t program it everywhere at every time. And Ravel himself disowned and mocked his composition as too simplistic and commercial. Sort of a long pop song.
But von Karajan knew its simple power. The power of seduction.
When a young Roy Orbison, future pop and rock star, was struggling to break out as a power songwriter, unhelped by his looks at a time when looks were becoming all that mattered in pop culture (not talent or ability), his record producer handed him an LP. It was of Ravel’s BOLERO. It may have even been a von Karajan recording.
“Make all your music sound like this,” Orbison’s producer told him. No fool, Roy took the advice.
He promptly started pooping out hit after hit. His songs build magnificently toward climaxes.
The only problem is that they climax after only 2 or 3 or 4 minutes. Usually while you were in the back seat of your father’s ’61 Ford. Hardly conducive to mature, satisfying love.
“In short,” Allan Bloom says of his students who were untutored in the ways of true love, “life is made into a non-stop (by quickie pop music) commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”
Orbison, who was one of the few rock stars who could have been an opera singer had he so chosen, presumably was happy with his fate. So was Elvis with his hips, the commercially pliable Beatles, and so on.
Today we swim in an overheated pool of come-come-come quickly-quickly-quickly at the speed of light, and not just because of our music choices.
I sense that Bloom is correct. Real eros takes time and patience.
Is it too farfetched to believe that dropping classical music appreciation classes in public schools has made us limp lovers?
