The Classical Connoisseur: A wine-tasting approach to music

The Classical Connoisseur presents a wine-tasting approach to music. The format is very much like wine-tasting, where music is ‘tasted’ with brief samples of 30 seconds to two minutes of duration. We traditionally teach music through a focus on structure, form, tonal centers, key relationships, or thematic development. The Classical Connoisseur, however, is an “anti -music appreciation” session where we focus on the dynamic intersection within music where composer, performer and listener all convene. This juncture is acknowledged with metaphor and imagination; gesture, rhetoric, color, image, motion, texture, sound qualities, time, and memory.

The analogy to wine-tasting is quite clear. Why do we enjoy wines and seek out further tastes and understanding? It is something other than our understanding of the structure, form, or ‘historical development’ of the fermented grapes that keeps us coming back. We are satisfied without a constant supply of ‘masterpieces’ of wine. Knowledge of the ‘proper facts’ of the grape, name, vineyard, age, etc. is rarely a prerequisite for discovering enjoyment, surprise, and disappointment. Rather, attending to our inner response to all the amazing components of wine is the essential ‘education.’ What worlds of inner connections - enchantment - imagination - lurk in one sip of wine!

In the Classical Connoisseur presentations I introduce the wine-tasting concepts by progressing through ideas of color, texture, movement, and image to the realm of metaphor. I usually begin with an excerpt from Butterworth with a full English string sound to launch ideas of color. Always eliciting adjectives from the listeners, I ask: what color, or colors? How large, how deep? Are there layers? What makes this palette of sound satisfying to you? Is it dark, or lush? Brilliant or muted?

The excerpts are short, but we may repeat listenings numerous times. Listeners are provided with a full list of works, complete with title, movement, composer, performer, CD information, at the end of the session. I rarely provide that information at the time of listening. Feedback from listeners suggests they also like not having the “added pressure” of knowing composers. This is a revealing comment we should bear in mind.

From this lush example I move on to a sample of Purcell, a six-voiced, tightly woven excerpt, performed on violas da gamba. The palette is much different. Through questions and soliciting adjectives we circle around the ideas of voices and tessitura. How many voices are speaking? Are they saying the same words? How are the voices stacked? An example of lots of voices in unison clarifies the sensation of lushness, and even hearing the effect of space between voices. Tessitura is then applied. The older instruments had a very limited tessitura, whereas the modern orchestra has a much wider range. How does this shape the color and provide tension? We listen to samples of layers of voices; then a single voice per line. From here ideas of texture start to emerge as I present more samples of music and build on their attentiveness to color, tessitura, space, individual and unison voices, etc.

One exceptional moment occurred during a session when I was talking about color, now as the stacking of different instruments. I played a section of a rather unknown moment in Copland’s Appalachian Spring ballet. At this place in the work, as often with Copland, he combines the clarinet with bassoon. The clarinetist plays in a comfortable, warm tessitura, which the listeners heard and confirmed. We listened again for the bassoon line. What does the bassoon line add? What colors, textures? And they did zero in on this bassoon line playing in unison at an octave, tucked into the clarinet sound. Now, I asked, what would be the effect if that bassoon line – even though it’s pretty much ‘out of sight’ the way it is - was not there? Realize I’m asking listeners to manipulate sound memories in their head! And they did it. Not all equally fluently, as we rarely let listeners exercise their aural imagination, but they went for the challenge eagerly. Then with their ideas, adjectives, and comments on what the bassoon voice adds, I clarified their perceptions. Effects were achieved in part by adding a bassoon line that is up high, in an uncomfortable range. Tessitura influences a musical effect more than we acknowledge. Also, by the way a bassoon adds qualities created by the use of vibrato. Vibrato seems to humanize a line, being that bit of mortal pulse.

In a presentation on Sound Qualities we heard an example of this humanizing effect of vibrato in a sample of Bruckner. I had two versions of the opening of the Andante of the 7th symphony. One conductor stacked the viola/tuba line with the brass tucked homogenously inside the violas, resulting in a very passionate and human effect. We heard full viola vibrato performed in a mid-range, resonant tessitura. Another sample had the brass as the main event, stacking the top tuba line as a solo melody. Without the viola line and its flavor exposed, the result was very different – muscular and majestic. Here, instead of the influence of vibrato, we heard the breath required by the brass players and how it adds its own expressive nuance.

In the Sound Qualities presentation I also played an excerpt from a new release of the latest violin superstar playing solo Bach. Again, they had no information as to composer, performer, etc. By now the listeners had a good sense of poetic foot, gesture and rhetoric; how players can clump (phrase) ideas so that the ear can grasp something more than just a sequence of unrelated notes; how rapid successions of sounds lose color as speed increases and become more textual to the ear. This was a very fast, completely un-rhetorical rendition of Bach. Upon hearing this excerpt most uttered, “Way too fast!” One listener blurted out quite vehemently “Why do they just play perfect notes – always exact! Can’t they find something to say?” Indeed, they found no poetic foot, no rhetoric - no metaphor. They heard no music.

Listeners can hear when we give them speed, flash, and hype as cheap caffeine and sugar. And now, the Classical Connoisseur gives them the vocabulary to express what had previously been carried as a burden of ignorance: “Well, I didn’t like that, but if it’s a superstar performer then it must be good. The problem is me - I must not understand music.”

The Classical Connoisseur presents an ear-opening view of music in all its pleasure, disappointment and surprise. I steer people towards an understanding of the aspects in music that currently satisfy their taste. I show how musicians and composers may successfully or indifferently create this. Once listeners become attuned to their own inner responses, they start to wonder about other effects currently outside their taste zone. Why do I like the music I like? What else is out there for me to taste? What more might resonate within me?

The Classical Connoisseur’s wine-tasting approach also opens the door for listeners to compile their own personalized and evolving list of masterpieces. They are free to look out side of the institutionalized moral agenda of classical music and discover the music that shapes, defines, amuses, challenges, seduces, teases, puzzles, thrills, and questions them as a listener and human being.

I leave listeners with these concepts as they continue on as a Classical Connoisseur:

• Be driven by curiosity and wonder, rather than the need to be right, or knowing.
• Be many-eared, as there is no single style of listening that reveals the whole.
• Insist that music and its practitioners – composers, performers – honor the metaphor.

It is through this imaginative realm of metaphor that we, perhaps, become less of a stranger to our self, each other, and the human experience.