Where I Was From

On Passion

Scanning through the available streams in iTunes this afternoon, I took a peek at the classical section. I'm usually loath to listen to classical radio because classical DJs are as tasteless as your standard country or rock DJ, forgoing anything interesting to play the blandest music available within their genre boundaries. Sure enough, the majority of the descriptions boasted about how calming their stations were, throwing out the word "relax" so much I thought I was reading the script from Zoolander.

That always gets my goat. Classical music is the least relaxing genre I can think of. What about the ecstatic highs and lows and Orff and Wagner and Beethoven? The use of actual dynamics? The intense scholarship that went into creating the music? The screaming and adultery and passion of opera? I can't understand the common view that classical music is something harmless and subdued, especially when it's compared to loud rock music with absolutely no heart behind it. Classical music is about shock and awe - even on completely acoustic instruments and voices that aren't even amplified.

This line of thinking comes up when I talk about ballet, as well. I know it's a strange old hobby and there's no reason someone from outside the subculture should have a frame of reference when it comes up in conversation between us. But it's odd to hear them assume it's some quaint and timid art form just because it's old-fashioned and obscure. Ballet is, to me, an extremely complex and difficult sport, full of blood and sweat and passion and great leaps across an unforgiving floor. I don't demand impossible athletic feats from my body and spend hours a week to be "cute." The dance forms that are popular now are just too easy - and therefore unrewarding - to attract as much of my attention.

William Faulkner described art and passion in the best way in his Nobel acceptance speech:

"The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."

Pop culture's fun, but it's 70% glands.

posted by Leah @ 4:43 PM