As someone whose knowledge of classical music could fit on the back of a postcard (“I’m at the Lyric Opera’s production of `Un Re in Ascolto.’ Wish you were here instead!”), I feel a certain freedom in saying this: Chicago’s major musical organizations are allowed, even encouraged, to continue to showcase new works, but only if they are works that do not insult melody.
Especially when I am in the audience.
I say this because two very rare ventures into the classical realm have led me to the aforementioned, aggressively discordant Luciano Berio opera and to a Chicago Symphony Orchestra offering of Pierre Boulez’s apparently long-awaited orchestration of “Notations VII” of his “Notations V-VIII.”
With the Boulez piece, conductor Daniel Barenboim labored to make the audience understand the work, playing it once solo on the piano before letting the big band have a go at it — and also patiently explaining that the piece was based on the repetition of a couple of notes.
That much I could have figured out for myself. What I needed from Barenboim, in my $40, knee-crunching, gravity-testing seat, was an explanation of why it qualified as music, which I generally understand to be a pleasing, or at least engaging, progression of notes and chords. This sounded more like carefully structured, expertly struck warm-up tones.
Thankfully, it only lasted eight minutes and was but one part of a program that also included the complex ear candy of a Mozart piano concerto.
The opera, whose title means “A King Listens” (suggested subtitle: “And Then Beheads”), was a more vexing matter, 90 minutes of direct sonic affront. I should have known something was up when a friend, a Lyric subscriber and no spendthrift, offered the tickets free of charge.
So splendidly staged that you could, with earplugs, enjoy it simply as visual art, “Un Re” seemed, without plugs, to be more than anything a deliberate ear-thumbing at audience expectation and experience.
Based on these two experiences, and a wide ranging lack of reading and listening, I have developed a theory about classical music. It is not like visual art, which can be stripped to a seeming bare minimum — a red stripe on a white canvas, for example — and still pack aesthetic punch.
It is more like writing, which, as any sampling of “experimental fiction” will show, requires some basics — verbs, discernible point of view — to produce an effect in the reader other than frustration. In music, perhaps the essential building block — the storyline of the piece — is melody. Without it, you may have something that is of academic interest, but you also have something that shouldn’t pretend it is intended for anyone but academics.
