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New to the ASO’s ‘Messiah’?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CLASSICAL BLOG
Fascinating to talk music with someone who loves the stuff but isn’t classical music hardcore.
It started like this: For the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus’ performance of Vivaldi’s “Gloria” and Handel’s “Messiah,” last Thursday in Symphony Hall, I took along AJC pop music critic Nick Marino, a discerning 20-something who’s (naturally) immersed in the rock-pop-hip hop world but who is learning the classics one concert at a time. Click here for the review.
The day after the ASO concert, Nick sent me this email, which I reprint with his permission:
“Thanks for bringing me along last night. When I got home, I went to iTunes looking for my favorite song of the night — ‘Dominie Fili Unigenite,’ from the Vivaldi. As I said, I heard the different movements as discreet songs, and that’s the one I liked best. iTunes had many different versions from which to choose, including one by the ASO. Ultimately, I decided that the ASO version sounded too soft and tamped-down, (perhaps because it was recorded in Symphony Hall?) compared with the brighter version by the ‘English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner & Monteverdi Choir.’ So I bought the latter for 99 cents, along with ‘Natural Born Killaz’ by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube.”
Several points jump out from his email. Although he said he knew the famous bits from “Messiah,” Nick was hearing these pieces for the first time. And like many people weaned on pop music, he compartmentalizes music as discreet “songs,” even when the format is a large-scale composition. Thus he’s willing to pick and choose which movements or arias or overtures he most enjoys and, for repeated listening, skip the rest.
When a classical radio station does this — i.e. plays the most contagious movements of symphonies and disembodied sections from larger works — the classical-music traditionalists call it “dumbing down.” Nick’s no dummy, to be sure, but he’s not on-board as a member of the classical family, either. (As an all-classical-almost-all-the-time listener, I grant tremendous respect to the composer’s wishes. If we’re talking about masters on the order of Handel and Vivaldi, I’ve learned by experience that trusting the composers’ judgement often yields a super-high payoff for music that’s not immediately catchy, although sometimes this takes many hours of dedicated listening.)
And, curiously, although a CD holds 80+ minutes and a digital download holds hours and hours of music, Nick’s concept of the short-form “song” seems a carry-over from a century ago— from the 78 rpm era — when technology was the limiting factor. Reinforced by commercial pop radio and shortening attention spans, the three-minute “song” has been the pop-culture standard ever since, even for popsters who could create music of any length and structure.
In many ways, I suspect Nick is typical of the younger generation of listener who approaches classical music as part of the same iTunes marketplace with gangsta rappers like Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. The “Hallelujah” Chorus can holds its own — so too, apparently, can “Dominie Fili Unigenite” — but what about the fragile creations, the hard-earned epiphanies, the quiet or poetic whispers that yield their secrets only reluctantly?
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