It’s Spotify “Wrapped” season. That is, the time of year in which the popular music-streaming service reveals to listeners data about their year in music: how much time they spent on it, what genres they preferred, their top artists and songs. In an oversharing culture, aesthetic imperatives trump any concerns about “surveillance capitalism” as Spotifiers gleefully display and discuss their tastes.
Yes, that includes me. I’m no music expert — except when I appear on our excellent podcast Political Beats (co-hosted by my colleague Jeffrey Blehar) to discuss Electric Light Orchestra. But as listeners either glory in the revealed obscurity of their music tastes or revel in the “special messages” they receive for being top fans of popular acts, I’d only like to explain why my favorite artist was not Taylor Swift (empress of the Zeitgeist), the increasingly dark and twisted nightmare that is Kanye West, or the once-great but now-middling Arcade Fire, but rather . . . Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Spotify reports that I spent 2,551 minutes (42.5 hours) listening to the 19th-century Russian composer, putting me in the top .1 percent of his “fans” on the service. But I am new to the Tchaikovsky “bandwagon.” My placement there is a product of a realization I had last year that I was a classical-music philistine, and a conscious decision I made subsequent to this realization: to listen to more of it. I started this journey somewhat arbitrarily, by listening to Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle in its entirety.
National Review has a great resource to aid such a course of action: my colleague Jay Nordlinger, a classical-music aficionado. When I came to Jay asking for guidance, he pointed me to something he had written years ago giving recommendations for a philistine such as myself: “just kind of a starter kit — some initial suggestions.” I compiled Jay’s suggestions onto a massive Spotify playlist (though not everything was available), and spent the next few weeks listening to it.
A religiously influenced decision gave me much more time to do so. In Modern Times, Paul Johnson reports that Vladimir Lenin viewed serious religion and devoted clerics as dangerous to his aims, and that he refused to listen to music because, he said, “it makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell.” So even though Johnson reports that Lenin was given to asceticism, he would have surely loathed my decision to listen exclusively to classical music (at least when I was in a position to choose the music) during Lent.
It was a rewarding experience. Depriving myself of the familiar structures (and strictures) of popular music made me, for that period at least, a different kind of listener. I encountered much that I recognized (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major — thanks WFB). The best classical music has thoroughly permeated even a culture as adrift from its roots as ours. I encountered much that was new to me, but that felt almost spiritually familiar, as though it either conveyed sentiments deep within me that I did not know music could fathom, or pointed me toward a transcendence I did not know music could reach. (And yes, I encountered much that bored me.)
The standout is hard to pick. Some of the greats, even those with whose work I was as familiar as a philistine could be, wowed me entirely anew. Patriotic fervor inclines me to honor Aaron Copland, whose music stands up nobly with the European greats while also embodying a uniquely American spirit.
But none of them compared with Tchaikovsky. I knew a little about the composer and his works before I set on this musical odyssey, mostly Swan Lake and The Nutcracker (portions of the latter of which have been smothered nigh to oblivion by overuse in Christmastime movie trailers). And I did not know until listening to his The Sleeping Beauty (which Spotify revealed as my favorite of his works) how much of the soundtrack for Disney’s animated film, which I loved as a child, owed directly to Tchaikovsky. But listening to these and other works, such as Romeo and Juliet, was a revelation. In their totality, even the ones I knew a little seemed brand new. Those that were completely new to me were resplendent.
I lack the musical vocabulary to describe in anything like technical detail Tchaikovsky’s skill, and the lushness and indelibility of his compositions. I will leave that to my colleague Sarah Schutte. Last year, Sarah defended the “splendor and majesty” of his music when a fit of misguided cultural antagonism toward all things Russian as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had led to the cancellation of some Tchaikovsky performances. Music, she wrote, has a unique “ability to transcend time and space.” And if anyone’s music can be said to have this quality, it’s Tchaikovsky’s.
My switch to classical music has not been permanent. I still find my ears mostly desiring those familiar pop and rock rhythms and melodies. But I returned to them a different listener. I noticed more of their subtleties, as well as what they didn’t have. I now derive additional enjoyment from the work of Electric Light Orchestra, whose eponymous mixing of rock and classical music I understand more fully. Particularly in the band’s raucous cover of “Roll Over Beethoven,” which opens just as Beethoven’s Fifth does before transitioning to a rollicking guitar lick, then alludes musically to Beethoven throughout its remaining eight or so minutes. And now I seek out some classical composers and their works of my own volition, for my own pleasure (Tchaikovsky chief among them), something I would have never done before.
NR Daily is delivered right to you every afternoon. No charge.
So roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news: According to Spotify, I’ve become one of his biggest fans. I’m not expecting a special message from someone who has been dead since 1893. But I don’t need one: His music, which will live forever, is more than enough for me.
My Spotify Wrapped: Tell Tchaikovsky the News
2
0
01.12.2023
It’s Spotify “Wrapped” season. That is, the time of year in which the popular music-streaming service reveals to listeners data about their year in music: how much time they spent on it, what genres they preferred, their top artists and songs. In an oversharing culture, aesthetic imperatives trump any concerns about “surveillance capitalism” as Spotifiers gleefully display and discuss their tastes.
Yes, that includes me. I’m no music expert — except when I appear on our excellent podcast Political Beats (co-hosted by my colleague Jeffrey Blehar) to discuss Electric Light Orchestra. But as listeners either glory in the revealed obscurity of their music tastes or revel in the “special messages” they receive for being top fans of popular acts, I’d only like to explain why my favorite artist was not Taylor Swift (empress of the Zeitgeist), the increasingly dark and twisted nightmare that is Kanye West, or the once-great but now-middling Arcade Fire, but rather . . . Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Spotify reports that I spent 2,551 minutes (42.5 hours) listening to the 19th-century Russian composer, putting me in the top .1 percent of his “fans” on the service. But I am new to the Tchaikovsky “bandwagon.” My placement there is a product of a realization I had last year that I was a classical-music philistine, and a conscious decision I made subsequent to this realization: to listen to more of it. I started this journey somewhat arbitrarily, by listening to Richard........
© National Review
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Donald Low
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
