Nathan Schiller

This is an audio post, so I suggest listening.

This is Kreisleriana, a fantasy by Robert Schumann. It’s the seventh movement, a contrast within contrasts. The first part is intensely melodic. Then it turns plush. A perfect bridge to an ineffable final movement.

I begin with this piece not because I think Schumann’s creation is eternally gorgeous, mysterious, and brilliant, though I do think it is all those, but because it is exciting. Because it has rhythm and energy. It’s a sound that gets your head bobbing—and that is something that too few Americans imagine classical music can do.

Americans have been taught that classical music sits on a pedestal. It must be studied, understood, and revered as the pinnacle of civilized musical artistry. This posture has disastrous effects even for its presumed disciples, the intellectually curious. Such a person, may, in youth, acting against pushy parents and stuffy teachers, tune it out, reject it, consider it bad and boring, worse than pretentious. Maybe that lasts their lifetime. Or maybe an insecurity develops, and one day they put classical music on some sort of checklist (along with reading Nietzsche, watching Godard, and visiting more museums).

Whatever the case, the reverence is misguided nonsense. But, of course, we might expect little more from a music industry built atop racial and gender apathy and exclusion, or an industry that’s resorted to de facto plagiarism to sell Mozart CDs.

In the US, there is a chasm between classical music and the millions of people who may be receptive to it on a purely aural level. This must be one of the biggest self-owns in the history of the music industry, and looks even more idiotic when one hears how contemporary classical composers have always innovated with sound.

I recently took an online survey for WQXR, New York City’s classical radio station. It was a fine questionnaire. But, near the end, it asked what I listen to classical music for. I checked the “other” box, and I wrote that the question exemplified everything wrong with classical music. I listen to classical music for the same reason I listen to Art Tatum and Arcade Fire, to Nina Simone and the Wu-Tang Clan: because they’re awesome.

This post is the first in a series. In it, I’ll talk about why classical piano is awesome; why, in America, it’s rife with problems; and what could be done about it. I’ll speak from experience and research, from my perspective as an obsessive listener and a classical piano hobbyist. And I’ll stick to the instrument. It’s what I know, and what I love.