Human Music

It sounds strange to say this, but I think it’s too easy to forget that music is composed by real people.

The lovely 19th-century living room you see in the picture above once belonged to a very short, mustachioed, Norwegian gentleman. He was never a healthy man, having suffered and lived through two particularly dangerous lung diseases in his youth, leaving him with a collapsed lung, a deformed spine, and a cane. Despite this, he would frequently go for long walks in the Norwegian countryside and when he got home he would often sit at that very piano and play, sometimes to his wife, who would on occasion sing along. Every day, however, he would walk down to the small red cabin at the base of his gardens, gardens that looked much like the painting above the piano in the picture. The red cabin was perched on the edge of a large silver lake that reflected the colour of the grey rain clouds as they occupied the sky for most of the year. Once inside, the small man would light a fire in the small wood-burner and the pipe in his mouth, then sit by the piano and think. He needed absolute silence in order to think, for he was easily distracted. Even a passing row-boat on the lake could break his concentration. At the end of the day, when he had finished his work, he left a note on the desk which said: “If anyone should break in here, please leave the musical scores, since they have no value to anyone except Edvard Grieg.”

Having recently come back from that very same place, and stood at the door of the very same cabin, my perception of music has been somewhat enriched. Every time I hear a piece of music by Grieg, I now picture the small man sitting in that small cosy cabin. I hear his pen scratching the manuscript paper as he writes, the wind outside blowing through the surrounding trees as I had heard it, the fire as it crackles in the corner of the room. I wonder about the simple things that went on behind the scenes of that piece of music, like what he might have had for lunch the day he wrote it. I wonder if he ever put down his pen and took a minute to look out the window to watch those rain clouds go by. I wonder, as I listen to a piece like Melancholy, what could have possibly happened to make him feel so sad that day.

As much as there is and always has been plenty of division in human society and culture, it is a fact that we all feel in the same way. In Nicholas Cook’s “Music: A Very Short Introduction”, he says “Music doesn’t just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it.” Musicians, the people who make music, don’t have some sort of music-making superpower. We’re people too, just like you. That is why you don’t need to be a musician to connect with a great composer like Edvard Grieg. He felt happiness, sadness, boredom, excitement, apathy, anger, love, frustration, in exactly the same way that you, reader, have undoubtedly felt. This is what I aim to explore through the things I learnt from a recent trip I took around Europe. In June, the EU held a competition giving away free interrail passes to those lucky enough to be selected. Being one of those lucky ones, I decided to make the most of this opportunity by undertaking a kind of musical pilgrimage. I set out, with a travel companion, to visit as many composers’ homes as possible in the space of two and a half weeks. We saw monuments, plaques, and the homes, of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Satie, Debussy, most of the Strausses, and of course, Grieg.

The purpose of this exploration, as I said at the start, is to reconnect the listener to the composer, human to human. As a jazz musician, one learns to recognise other jazz musicians by their style, tone and technique. Have you ever seen someone hear some jazz and be able to identify the musicians playing, even if they’ve never heard the tune before? This is because rather than performing pre-composed works, jazz musicians speak with their own voices through the art of improvisation, using the language of music to do so spontaneously. Referring back to a quote I used in an earlier blog post, “jazz is to classical music as having a good conversation is to reading a good book aloud.” This is not to say that jazz is superior. I mean simply to say that it is easier to connect with another person when you are speaking to them face to face than when you are reading their words from a book, and so perhaps the reason for the estrangement of classical music from the mainstream is because people forget that it has been composed by a real person. Modern audiences can’t ‘talk’ to the composers of classical in the same way that they can with jazz musicians, because all they have left is what was written down. Jazz music emerged in an era of technological advancement, in the era of recorded music. This means that the creators and the pioneers, like Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, etc. could record their brand new music as it was being created. There are recordings of Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet back in the 1920s, and so when you put on the record, it’s as if he were in the room with you. There is no middle-man, not even time – it’s Louis Armstrong and you, with just a speaker in between. This special kind of link is non-existent for classical composers. Their music, written down all those years ago, goes through publishers, conductors, performers, each with their own interpretations that differ slightly from that of the composers. This is why it is easy to become separated from the original source. So I hope that as I share some of the stories that I learnt from this trip, you’ll find yourself a little more familiar with these people who lived two hundred, three hundred years ago. Hopefully, you may find yourself appreciating this music a little more.

Our first stop, Paris, was home to Erik Satie and Frederic Chopin, so I will share with you a few portraits of these composers to get us started. I have to admit, I found it a little harder to connect with one of these in the way I connected with Grieg and the others, because Erik Satie, I have come to understand, was a strange man. He lived beside Montmartre, in a tiny 9m2 room with his two pianos stacked one on top of the other, his collection of 100 umbrellas, and his 7 identical grey corduroy suits. He once claimed “that he only ever ate food that was white”, although he once ate an omelette made of 30 eggs, and on another occasion consumed 150 oysters in one go. It is no surprise, then, that he gave his pieces odd titles like ‘Three Pear-shaped Préludes‘, or ‘Dried Embryos‘. This was a real person, who lived and breathed the same Earth air that we do. The caricature of his life was perpetuated for me when we reached the neighbourhood surrounding his tiny home. It was as if we had been transported back in time to a 1920’s Paris, with its winding cobbled streets, ornate lampposts and quaint little cafés with sounds of clinking glasses and steady chatter. We struggled to walk up the Montmartre hill to reach his home but Satie would have done this every day. He must have been very fit.

Having lived in Paris, I grew up with the Tuileries as my back garden, the Louvre as my classroom, and the courtyard of the Palais-Royal as my playground. Nearly two hundred years ago, Chopin would have walked from his home at Place Vendome to the Tuileries and strolled beside the same fountains that I used to sit by. On his way to the luxury shops in the arcades of the Palais Royal, he would have walked through the very same square where I used to play tag with my brother. As we stood under the plaque that commemorates his residence at 12 Place Vendome, we imagined hearing the sound of a melody played on the piano drifting through an open window. We pictured his relatives, later in time, rushing through the crowds in order to reach the sickly man as he took his last few breaths between those very walls. I imagined that he and I may have had similar experiences, living in Paris. In George Orwell’s ‘Down And Out In Paris And London’, there’s a scene where Orwell talks about his own unpleasant experience in a French pawnbrokers which made me laugh, as I instantly recognised the behaviour from my own time in France. “Afterwards, when it was too late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in the afternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.” Though ‘Down and Out’ was published in 1933, it showed that in almost one hundred years the French had not changed their ways, so I wonder if Chopin, in the 1800s, would have experienced the same treatment, and I wonder how he would have reacted to it coming from Poland. All this wondering brings Chopin to life a little bit more, and so brings his music to life in the same way. Now, have a listen to this, and think of this man sitting by his piano scratching each note into a square of manuscript paper with a feather quill. What kind of person can you see?

Vienna was the second stop on our journey, and the city was a music student’s dream. They had Hollywood-style pavement stars for famous composers. We saw the opera ‘Ariadne Auf Naxos‘ in the Vienna State Opera for 3 euros. Mozart merchandise was everywhere, with our favourite store called ‘Mostly Mozart’, and around every corner there were gangs of people dressed as ‘Mozarts’ selling discounted concert tickets, pictures of which can be found at the end. Here I must say, the makers of the film ‘Amadeus’ should almost have a lot of apologies to make, as they have misinformed an entire generation of film-watchers about the real life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. However, owing to the fact that it is a masterpiece of a movie, the apologies can be spared. W.A. Mozart never found an enemy in Antonio Salieri. The latter was even a friend, tutoring Mozart’s son after his father’s death. Though, Mozart was immature, and according to his sister Nannerl he “remained a child his entire life”. Evidence of this can be found in his lesser-known works, such as “Leck mich im Arsch“, or “Lick My Arse”, a cannon intended to be sung at parties. (Have a listen.)

His home in Vienna was his largest and most lavish. They aren’t quite sure which rooms were used for what purpose, but the largest room of the apartment was almost certainly the ‘living room’, where he and his wife Constanze would play board games, read their books by the fire, host their guests, and the children would run about playing tag, annoying their parents. During our time in Vienna, as we visited the apartment ourselves, I stood looking out the window of that room, which faced a narrow street paved with cobbles and lined with fine Viennese buildings painted a creamy pastel yellow. There, I wondered how many times Mozart would have taken a pause to look out the very same window, seeing the very same street, either thinking about his next great work, or something as ordinary as whether it was time to buy new shoes. The reason I say this is because there is a common misconception that these great composers were always composing. Of course, they lived for their music, but sometimes they would have done completely ordinary things, things that you and I do, like buying new shoes. Mozart loved pool, so he’d often be found in the local inn playing and drinking there. He’d talk about the weather, go to church, read books and eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. He’d go to bed in the evening, and get up in the morning. He breathed, yawned, coughed, blinked, and sneezed just as you do. All this sounds obvious but when you play his music, it is often the case that the human disappears and all people hear is the flutes and the violins making noises. But the only reason that flute is making that noise is because Mozart put it there. I find that knowing there is a human on the other end of the music makes it so much more exciting as a listener. Suddenly, listening to music is no longer a solitary experience, rather a conversation between two people, the composer and the listener (and to some extent the performer, though that is a discussion for another time). This is how classical composers speak, this is their language, like jazz musicians and their improvisation. When I play something by Mozart, this symphony for example, it’s as if he were in the room, itching to tell me something really exciting. When I play this one, I feel the weight of something terrible that he is going through, and I wonder what that might have been. For example, out of the six children that Mozart and Constanze had, only two survived to adulthood. Could this be part of his grief over losing a child?

Of the objects inside the apartment, there were very few originals; however, we did get to see one original that caught me by surprise, because I’d never seen or even heard of it before. It was Mozart’s death mask, and the first thing I noticed about it was that you could see the individual hairs of his eyebrows. The bags under his eyes, the defined cupid’s bow, laugh lines, brow bone and cheekbones – suddenly Mozart was in 3D. There are speculations about the authenticity of the mask, but I choose to ignore those, purely because seeing it fills me with such a sense of wonder that if it were proven to be fake, I would feel like a child being told that Santa isn’t real. Many artists have attempted to capture the man’s infamously ill-favoured complexion, but none of them make him as real to me as that mask and I will explain why after this visual interlude.

*Visual Interlude experiencing technical difficulties*

In Nicholas Cook’s book that I mentioned earlier, he keeps referring back to this concept of ‘authenticity’ in music. He says that in the 19th century, there was a change in the artistic world, a change in how audiences received and responded to art and artists. More than ever before, the arts became tools of expression for the individual. As an example, he says “when we listen to Beethoven’s music, we don’t just listen to the sound it makes. We hear it as music by Beethoven.” Much like the “conversation” point I made in the previous paragraph, 19th-century composers and audiences actually viewed music in exactly the way that I’m talking about. They saw it as the voice of the composer; music was a vessel, a language for composers to express ideas and emotions through. However this, ironically, led to certain assumptions being made about composers’ lives in order to make them seem more authentic, like otherworldly beings who somehow could tap into a purer stream of creativity, like they had that music-making superpower that I mentioned at the start; because to them, “music must be authentic, for otherwise it is hardly music at all”. For those of you that have seen the Amadeus movie, the way Salieri refers to Mozart as God’s chosen vessel for delivering His greatest music is an example of this. The exaggerations of their lives and personalities that came about over that time have distorted their truths up to this very day, like Chinese whispers. Like the film Amadeus’ portrayal of Mozart, the caricature of the mad composer, ostracised from society with a tortured past and turbulent life lives on to this day, and contributes to the estrangement of classical music in the mainstream because it alienates the people who made the music. I think that’s why the death mask made such an impact on me. When I looked at it, the man we call Mozart had been stripped away of all assumptions, all myths and legends, all sense of time, and was left with nothing but his face. I saw the face of a man who I know loved music, and as I’m someone who loves music, I felt like I could connect with him, 300 years after his lifetime. Of course, one can never truly know what he was like in the flesh. I can’t claim to know his mannerisms, his accent, or the “large, intense eyes” that he is said to have had. His music, however, is his mind, and what else do we really need to know about someone before we can say that we know them? What makes us human? If the answer is our minds, then we could all get to know Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart very well if we wanted to; we’d just have to listen to his music.

The other classical giant that we met on the trip was Ludvig Van Beethoven. I really warmed to Beethoven as we found out more about his life on this trip because I knew next to nothing about him before. Where I was expecting to find the infamously ill-tempered man, I found a tender and sentimental one, who felt all emotions deeply and reflected that in his music. At his home, we saw a painting of him walking along a forest path, clearly deep in thought, his coat and his hair posing dramatically with the wind. In that painting, I saw the drama of the 19th century’s ideal composer, with his furrowed brow and pensive pose. But most prominently, I saw loneliness. At the exhibition in Beethoven’s residence in Vienna, they had on display one of the letters that Beethoven had written to his brothers, Carl and Johann. It’s called the Heiligenstadt Testament, and it is Beethoven’s heart-breaking admission of his increasing deafness, depression, and loneliness. I would recommend you read it all, but here is an extract:

“Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was ever inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or perhaps be impossible). Though born with a fiery, active temperament, even susceptible to the diversions of society, I was soon compelled to withdraw myself, to live life alone. If at times I tried to forget all this, oh how harshly was I flung back by the doubly sad experience of my bad hearing. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, “Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.” Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.—Oh I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I would have gladly mingled with you.”

Beethoven has an almost mythic status in the musical world. Why? Because his music was so different from anything that had come before it, that audiences elevated him and his music to an almost super-human status. His music was what set off this 19th-century fantasy of ‘authenticity’. But when I read that letter for the first time in Vienna, the humanity in him broke through. He struggled with illness, alcoholism, and depression, all rooted in his loss of hearing at the age of 28. As he puts it, losing “the one sense which ought to be more perfect in [him] than others” is a true tragedy. I knew very little about Beethoven, and still do, but of what I had heard, he had a temper. On the trip, I expected to hear more about his tantrums and petty confrontations like so many other famous artists. I did hear some, like his ‘Eroica‘ symphony originally being dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte until Beethoven found out about Bonaparte’s new self-appointed status as emperor. Beethoven then tore out the front page of the manuscript and scratched out the Frenchman’s name in a bout of rage, replacing it with a dedication “to the memory of a great man”. Ouch. Or take this anecdote: “People complained he kept odd hours and played the piano too loudly, and, worst of all, he had a habit of shouting at his servants for stealing from him – the Rondo a capriccio of 1795 later gained the nickname Rage Over A Lost Penny because on the night he was writing it, the composer was sure a maid had stolen his gold penny and he turned his entire apartment over looking for it.” But between the anger and irritation, there were so many more facets to his emotional profile that came through in his letters, his lifestyle, and most of all, his music.

The piano sonata n. 8 in C minor – a well-known piece by Beethoven. Let’s listen to the second movement, and now tell me, could an angry man write music like this? Listen to the delicacy of the melody at 11:15, uncertainty at 12:40, the triumph at 13:00 and finally the exultation at 13:35, where the beat is suddenly divided into three which, evoking waltz-like motion, makes us want to sway and swing to the familiar melody. Picture this lonely man, sitting by his piano in a room so messy he could barely move around in it. Plates of old food stacked in the corners, papers scattered, for Beethoven was known for his messiness. Picture him playing this music, music that came from his own head, and ask yourself what he’s thinking when he’s playing it. What kind of person does this music make him? What kind of person does it take to write music like this? I can’t tell you the answers to these questions, because the whole point of this exercise is to get you to find your own meaning in the music. Develop your own relationship with these composers, treat it like a friendship, and you will find yourself getting so much more out of this music.

It was nice to see so much exposure for this kind of music in Vienna. It is comforting to see that in all these years, Vienna has not lost its relevance as one of the music capitals of the world. It is another example of music’s immunity to time. Leaving Vienna, we set out for Prague, stopping off in Salzburg along the way. Surrounded by rural idyll, Salzburg is Mozart’s hometown. We reached Mozart’s geburtshaus, his ‘birth house’, and stood in the very room where Mozart was born. I had my first ever Mirabell Mozart chocolate, and bought myself a Mozart tote bag from the gift shop. Suffice to say, I was happy. Once in Prague, we struggled to find many musical landmarks so we mostly took in the architecture and the views. We saw a few locations where ‘Amadeus’ was filmed, including the Prague Opera House where in 1787 Mozart premiered his 19th opera, ‘Don Giovanni’. In the Don Giovanni scene in ‘Amadeus’, you can see Tom Hulce as Mozart conducting the orchestra in the exact same spot where Mozart would have conducted it. It was at this point in the trip where I stayed up one night in the hostel and watched Don Giovanni, becoming mildly obsessed with ‘La ci darem‘, despite the opening melody having a very small resemblance to the opening tune of Monty Python’s lumberjack sketch.

On our way to Berlin from Prague, we took the ‘Johannes Brahms’ train to Leipzig, which was a happy coincidence. Leipzig is, of course, the home and final resting place of Johann Sebastian Bach. As Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig from 1723 to his death in 1750, Bach wrote new pieces almost every week for a number of years. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Leipzig, just long enough to visit the Bach Museum and see St. Thomas Church, and then we were off to Berlin. But I found this article in the Guardian about Bach which sums up rather nicely all the points I’ve been making: “After years of research, Sir John Eliot Gardiner says biographers have been so “overawed” by the composer that they have presented a misleading image of the man. They have depicted him as a “paragon of rectitude, studious and dull, with the false assumption that music of such extraordinary and sublime quality must have come from somebody who was beyond criticism“. But ultimately, “we yearn to know what kind of a person was capable of composing music so complex that it leaves us completely mystified, then … so irresistibly rhythmic that we want to get up and dance to it, and then … so full of poignant emotion that we are moved to the very core of our being.” “

Though many composers have lived, performed in, and visited Berlin, we struggled to find anything musical to see there too, most likely because the majority of Berlin was lost to bombing during the wars. The most we could find was a three-sided monument to Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn in a park, which made for a nice picnic spot. Though of course Berlin is seeped in history, and so we visited the Holocaust Memorial, followed the traces of the Berlin wall, and visited the DDR museum which gave you an immersive experience of life in East Berlin during the 60s. To see a city that has known so much exlusion, oppression, and hostility, made us think about how lucky we were, having just visited five other countries in the space of two weeks. It was a wonderful thing to see the city now recovering, doing everything it can to move away from its past. Music had and still has its part to play in that recovery, as musicians gathered at the wall to celebrate its demolition in 1989; on December 25th of that year, Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s 9th symphony, changing ‘Ode to Joy‘ to ‘Ode to Freedom‘. Berlin marked the half-way point in our journey, so from here on, we were headed home. In musical terms, Berlin was the dominant seventh to our turnaround. After four days in the city, we got on a train to Aalborg, a small town in the north of Denmark. We stayed there for the night before taking a ferry to Norway the next day. We almost missed the ferry, because a lack of proper signposting and a misreading of Google maps on my part took us down to the vehicle entrance, across motorways and through patches of quicksand, with the daylight and my phone battery percentage quickly fading. There was a point where I wondered if we were going to make it home at all, but a few motorway crossings later we made it to the ferry, where we paused and reflected on the simple joys of being still alive. I can’t say the ferry agreed with me at first, and I spent a lot of the journey standing by the railings trying to keep my lunch down, whilst hoping not to be swept over by the wind. But being forced to stand outside meant I could take in the full scope of the Norwegian Fjords, the sight of which I will not soon forget. Waterfalls cascaded down from terrible heights, with only a fraction of the water actually reaching the sea – the rest of it being swept away by those powerful winds of which I was almost a victim. After 16 hours at sea, we docked in Bergen, the hometown of a small, mustachioed gentleman who we’ve already met.

After the disaster with the ferry, Bergen was a refuge for our spirits. The people were friendly, the hostel was clean, and best of all, everything was very clearly signposted. When we got on the tram to reach our next musical destination, we noticed that every stop had its own jingle. We even knew when to get off, because as we neared the stop called ‘Troldhaugen’, which is the name of Grieg’s home, we heard the seven introductory chords of Grieg’s piano concerto. We followed the signs and the further we got from the tram station, the more it looked like the painting above the piano that I spoke about earlier. A light rain had begun to fall, which darkened the soil, brightened the green moss, and released the fresh scents of the forest. We heard nothing but the wind in the trees, the rain tapping the leaves, and little birds singing our welcome. I never thought it possible to fall in love with a building, but I could happily live the rest of my life in the house that Grieg built. We spent a long time there, walking through the forests surrounding it, breathing in the cold northern air and the smells that travelled in it. I recalled Grieg’s music as we stood amongst the trees and I heard the birds sing his melodies whilst the wind conducted an ensemble of trees to play his harmonies. It is no surprise that someone could write such sweet music in such a beautiful setting.

Music is, like any other art form, a form of communication. One human being will make some noises that another will interpret to have a certain meaning. I do think, however, that music affects us more deeply than any other art form. Our auditory sense is an integral part of our identity as humans because we have language. At this point I must again pose the question – what makes us human? This is a big question with many answers, but one of which I think is language. Again in Cook’s book, he says “Language constructs reality rather than merely reflecting it”. For example, this can be seen in the differences in language between different cultures – Inuits have multiple different words for “snow”, meaning they can see things in snow that we English speakers cannot. They actually see the world differently because of their language. And how do we communicate that language? Through making noises and interpreting someone else’s noises. Music is exactly the same. It constructs reality in exactly the same way. This is why I think music is integral to humans and we cannot live without it. Where humans go, music goes – because humans are the ones making the music. We are making music to communicate, in exactly the same way that we make words to communicate. It’s just a different form of communcation. It’s like saying ‘Hello’, then ‘Bonjour’, then ‘Konnichiwa’, then playing a perfect cadence. So when you listen to Beethoven’s piano sonata, what do you think he’s trying to communicate? Listen to it closely, and concentrate on an emotion that you’re feeling. Hold on to it, no matter what it is, and magnify it. This is what Beethoven felt, two hundred years ago, when he wrote it. Suddenly time is of no importance. Beethoven is alive because he’s making you feel that emotion, right now, while you listen. Mozart is alive too, and so are Grieg and Satie and Chopin. Like, as I said at the start, playing a Louis Armstrong record and hearing his voice through the speaker. This is the power of music, immortalising the words of these people who speak this universal language. To finish, I will leave you with a letter that was written by Felix Mendelssohn when asked about his ‘Songs Without Words’:

“There is so much to say about music, yet so little is said. For my part, I believe that words do not suffice for such a purpose. People often complain that music is too ambiguous; that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to and entire speech but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music. The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite. The same words never mean the same things to different people.

Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling which is not expressed, however, by the same words. Words have many meanings, but music we could both understand correctly. Will you allow this to serve as an answer to your question? At all events, it is the only one I can give, although these, too, are nothing, after all, but ambiguous words!”