Leave me alone!
WARNING: This post is a venting-out of boiling anger, which can amount to mental illness. Maybe not for those weak of heart, but for sure for those who caused me so much anxiety, and contrarily, those who want to help me out of this. As for everyone else, read and suffer.
Well, corona, the world is practically on fire, and what else... Oh yes. Things in the relatively more intimate world (that is, for me) - namely, school, my followings on Instagram, YouTube and email subscriptions - keep bothering me to an incredible extent. I was wanting to write this blog post since March honestly, but I didn't find the time and the need to vent everything out. Now, though, that I am really mad, I'm somewhat thankful for the opportunity, because I'm making my opinions known, and merely hoping that they get more circulation than before.
My main classical music following had been Deutsche Grammophon and Decca (through email and Instagram, and - in the case of the latter - 2 YouTube channel subscriptions), the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras (Instagram), Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc (email) and the ClassicsToday.com editor David Hurwitz (YouTube viewing). All of the following had, to a certain extent, drive me insane in the past few months, in ways that I can't describe (one time with Hurwitz, it was so much so I needed to vent my anger in this very outlet). To a certain extent, for those who remember, the same happened with the Mahler Foundation in May, but since writing that post, I've come to realize that not only this is pretty much not important (at least much less than it seemed at the time), there are far worse issues that I'll need to address (I won't yet, perhaps to get more reading and get the image fixed, but I'm hoping I will address this important issue relatively soon). My great bane with the BPO and VPO, but especially with DG, came around the time of the Salzburg Festival in August, which was itself a bane all by itself, but by having these 3 leading musical institutions being an important part of the Festival just made me go bonkers. I don't really had a problem with the Festival being held at the time, when corona cases where relatively low, as long as the Festival was being sensitive, and did things on a much smaller scale as they had said at the beginning that they would. But the moment that they do Elektra and Mahler's 6th, whatever social distancing there would occur in the audience, with so many people onstage and/or in the pit, they're just calling for trouble. It is indeed something of a miracle that there were no casualties during the Festival, but I really think it would have been smarter not to take the risk, whatever the need for culture (besides, probably only those who would attend are those who are "jet-set" and are in Salzburg every year for the wrong reasons, but I will maybe discuss that sometime). The Vienna Philharmonic were therefore one of the major partners in the crime, more so than their Berliner counterparts. But, and this is the important part, I would very much in my hoped-for career as probable pianist and maybe composer, but most as conductor, want to collaborate with the Berliners and the Viennese. They are orchestras that I maybe don't need, but I do want to make music with. The same thing can't really be said for Decca and, more importantly, DG. Interestingly, Decca almost seems dead in the way that they rarely post on Instagram, sent a newsletter or upload on YouTube, while DG is excessive beyond normal human standards. I think they post on Instagram averagely 3 times a day, upload on YouTube twice, and send a newsletter each weekend. How the hell can you bear such a thing?! There are more adventurous labels with pretty "big names" (Alpha, Chandos and Hyperion, to name just three), that I would feel more comfortable to record with, than DG, Decca and probably also Warner (I don't follow them anywhere, which is probably just as good, considering the pervious sentences).
In addition, throughout the Festival the Karajan institue also helped to bring in their own click-baiting and "martyring" of their namesake. My attitude to Karajan as man and conductor is more mixed than it was in the past (most of which can be attributed to Lebrecht), but ever since then they made me emotionally sick with statements to the effect that Karajan was the greatest conductor ever. I have to admit that I'm much more of a Bernstein fan, and that I had barely listened to Karajan recently, but the Bernstein Offices never, apart from the centenary, did interviews of the Karajan kind, and even I'm going to admit that some Bernstein interpretations are less well than some others, maybe even than Karajan's!
So now with the Salzburg band-wagoning out of the way, there are two other culprits: Hurwitz and Lebrecht. I've encountered Hurwitz fairly recently, and I should add, that I have rather mixed relations towards him. One day in the morning, I see a video he uploaded and it makes me absolutely mad (see the link above), and then in the evening he uploads a humorous roast with which I completely agree. But generally, I'm just mixed with him. My relation to Lebrecht is also mixed, though generally positive. He has just finished a survey of most of Beethoven's output. However, his behavior regarding the "Schenker storms" is either complete misunderstanding or just outright conservative foolery.
There are 2 other "classical music" personalities which I have to mention. My relation with Mark Berry is very mixed, but he hasn't bothered me as much since March, as the main activity on his blog Boulezian (shows pretty much where he is heading) is concert and opera reviews, and he didn't have much of a chance to that, so I'm thankful for that. I will give him credit though that he is actually one of 2 people whose blogs gave me the impetus to start mine.
The other one is the other "classical music" personality I want to talk about briefly, Kenneth Woods. He is music director of the Colorado MahlerFest, the English Symphony Orchestra, and writer for his blog View from the Podium. I like him very much, as I share a lot of his musical affinities - Mahler and Shostakovich, to begin with - as well as professional insights into music of (among many others) Strauss and - perhaps more importantly from an interpetive point of view these days - Beethoven. I kind of just happen to agree with many of his opinions, and even those which I didn't think of before, I agree with them because they make sense to me. I think that the reason he appeals to me, is because he's a conductor and a cellist (also used to be a guitarist, and does it in his free time!). With the exception of Hurwitz, who was a percussionist in local orchestras, everyone else I mentioned above are scholar-critics. Woods appeals to me because he's a practical musician (and he keeps a rule not to talk about any living conductors, or at least not mentioning them by name). He was an orchestral cellist, as well as a soloist and chamber music partner as well, so he experiences the actual music world of making music from both sides, as cellist and conductor. Hurwitz, Lebrecht and Berry all might have interesting observations, but their ultimate test is in the performance lab, and that is why I like Woods so much.
So far, I've dealt with classical music's personalities and industry. Now I have to deal with my friends and other Instagram followings. It's more irritating, because even though they are dishonest like the "establishment-industry", they are closer in my world in a sense. Yom Kippur was recently, and I can still remember everyone around just going "I'm sorry, God" and all the other standard things one says before Yom Kippur. WHO THE HELL ARE YOU KIDDING!!! Everyone, especially yourselves, know that we promise never to do these things again, and barely an hour has passed since Yom Kippur is out, and we come back to do those things again. Every year it happens. Everyone knows it, it is simply an open secret that nobody either needs or wants to say. I say the same on myself, by the way. Yom Kippur is a complete lie for us, because neither me, you, and even the most just and Mitzvah-keeping person on Earth, are able to keep the promises that we will get better than this. It never happens. Why do we get flodded with this? It's absolutely no worth. You say that you're "sorry about the way I insulted you"? Complete rubbish. Unless you found out that the entire situation was so stupid you can laugh about it, nobody is sorry about anything they said. The king is naked, and as the meme says, "always has been".
My classmates start growing on my nerves sometimes. The way people just ask for answers so immediately and lazily, without having tried to answer things themselves just makes me go mad. I don't have a problem if they try to do it, or if they're in a rush at the last moment, and ask some guys for answers. But when as soon as the assignment is sent, they ask for someone to do the job for practically 10 other classmates (if not more!), that's too annoying.
My teachers, however, go on a different way of making my life difficult. They don't really annoy me by poking their selfish faces at me as much as expecting me to do everything perfectly. Even those who are kinder (in a sense, since I'm one of the good boys, so kinder practically means that they teach better or are more interesting) make me mad. There are only 2 teachers (another comes close) in the entire school I'm able not only to appreciate, but also to love learning with them. Fortunately, one of them is my homeroom teacher. Without these few teachers, I wouldn't care about school at all. It could just go to hell. We currently have a shutdown, but I still remember a few weeks ago that during a math class, I needed to read my score of Shostakovich's 4th just to keep myself from making my mental health even worse than it was (and probably still is). And even during shutdown, things are not improving. Zoom calls were to be a complete waste of time, were it not for my piano lessons and (sometimes) therapist sessions. History class is especially badly taught. The teacher of that class is of the kind of "the smaller the group - the better", because when I was with her in smaller groups she truly was better. Mind you, I'm the nerd guy who loves history (though I'm probably not the only one in our class), and she managed to make history boring. That's a complete failure. Sports class is a complete waste of time in ways I can't really describe. You can only feel it.
I have though been somewhat fortunate since May and June. Because of my critique of the Mahler Foundation and its online Festival, I've got in touch with a 8th-grader (they/them) from Canada, an a college sophomore in English literature from Florida. We three formed an online gang of just us, getting together on the basis of our love for Mahler and Shostakovich. With their advice, having understood that I will need some really fitting music to get me through the year, I've decided that I will listen on my way to and back from school, as well as during breaks, to listen to nothing but Shostakovich. That plan sort of fell through pretty quickly (by which I mean, only 3 days), but Shostakovich was a great part of my phone repertoire in these first 3 weeks of the school-year. In the last week, however, Henze's Fantasia for Strings took over, and it was somewhat fitting, given that the music began its life as Henze's score for Young Törless, an adaptation of the novel by the fairly similar name of Robert Musil, by Volker Schlöndorff (his directorial debut). These two, the 8th-grader and the sophomore, are practically my main lights these times, when we sometimes meet for a call on Discord at night.
However, these few lights are still engulfed by the complete darkness and hypocrisy that surrounds me now. I've had enough! My complaints go out now especially to the education system in this country which is just reacting horribly to the situation! I can simply go crazy from that! All the Instagram personalities, do me a favor, and please do consider those who are probably less well mentally than you are, and stop showing the way you're enjoying yourselves in pools and parties. And cut the "no filter" crap! If something would have really been with no filter, it would be ordinary and dull. To quote Alex Ross, who in turn paraphrases Nietzsche, I'm done with "the lie of the grand style". Less Wagner (in his conservative bits) and his idiotic imitators, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and all those who thought that music stopped with Beethoven, more Mussorgsky, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Satie, Stravinsky, Bartok, Shostakovich, Weill, Hindemith, Weinberg, Bernstein, Britten, Nono, Berio, Henze, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Penderecki, Schnittke, even Boulez and Cage. And please do more meaningful Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius.
(Quick sidenote: I have to admit, that this post was written in turns, I wasn't commited to write it. Sometimes I got super angry and vented.)
A few days ago, my sophomore friend sent me a link to a Discord server, where she, the 8th-grader and a couple other friends were part of, and asked me if I would join in. I said I would join gladly. This is my first Discord server, and therefore I've got 4 other friends. This is where I feel at home, where I belong (not in terms of family, thank God, but in terms of friends). I really do prefer being with them than with my classmates.
Our educational system is either a joke, or a gulag. What is the point to have being taught the material on Zoom, for averagely 6 and a half hours a day, 5 days a week, and putting even more workload on us than we had been in school physically, and even more than when we studied online from March to June! And then they expect us to ace through the final exams that we have in the next 2 years! Once in the past few months, I've once wondered about a question: would I prefer to ace my exams, but thereafter being so mentally and emotionally shocked that I will need psychaitric treatment? Or should I not do them at all, but still being able to do what I love doing and be happy with myself? After thinking about it for several seconds, I answered that I would prefer the latter, and ever since then I've been saying this to certain people around me unhesitatingly.
Leave me alone! I'm not able to cope with all of this! I'm feeling so empty, I don't even want to eat a whole ton, sleep a lot, or even die! I'm just empty! I'm barely able to play the piano (that is mentally), I just get tired of it almost immediately! I don't want this to happen! Everything loses its appeal to me!
Over the past few weeks, I've come to know Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet, one of the most autobiographical and depressive pieces ever written. It was composed in 1960, when he had just returned from bombed-out Dresden, where there was a movie filmed about the last days of World War II to which Shostakovich composed the music, but more importantly, it was not long after he had suddenly joined the Soviet Communist Party (probably forced to). These 20 minutes of the quartet feature throughout a musical motif - the pitches D, E-flat, C, B-natural. In German notation they are D, S (in German it's actually Es, but the pronounciation is the same), C, H (B is used in German for B-flat). The composer's name, as rendered in German is: Dmitri Schostakowitsch. This is not the first time he has been consciously using this motif (he had already been doing so for nearly a decade), but this is the most extensive use he has ever made of it. It's as if he is obsessed with himself. Shostakovich, as a result of joining the party, was obsessed with suicide, and most of his works from there on consider death, in a way he rarely did previously, death for completely fatalistic reasons, nothing to do with the authorities. The 15th String Quartet, his last, is even bleaker.
The basic point is that ever since I came to know this piece and the school year started, I've used the slogan DSCH as a symbol of protest. I can still remember having half-done math homework, and before scanning them and sending, I scribbled DSCH clearly and furiously across the top of the first page.
The last movement of Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet, a slow fugue on a theme beginning with the DSCH motif, is the movement in which Shostakovich seems to obsessed with this motif the most. And all I can say is that for the past two months, if not even more, I've been wanting to just say "Leave me alone!" for eternity, like DSCH in that movement. Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone....leave me alone...leave me alone....leave me alone....leave me alone.....leave me alone..... leave me alone..... leave me alone..... leave me alone....... leave........... me.......... alone......... leave......... me........ alone....... leave....... me....... alone............ leave............ me............. alone................ leave.............................. me.............................. alone..............................
leave me alone