Classical music is fascist

Every day I wake up to Classical 89.3 FM, "Music and Ideas," and most of the time, I only half comprehend what the voice on the air is talking about. This morning I was sleeping late, finger-humping the snooze button until a few minutes after 9, when the soothing patter of Melissa Ousley came on (she also hosts Music from Minnesota on Saturdays), and she said something that struck me as completely hilarious.

I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it went something like: "Here are four short Brahms pieces for piano. Just to warn you ahead of time, they finish quite a bit louder and faster than they start."

I appreciated this caveate. The purpose of morning classical radio is hardly to startle the half awake. That's why Ousley and her colleagues spew nonstop white-mouth-noise on the air, never failing to sound less than surreal. They're informative, too, like a radio equivalent of Classical Music For Beginners, the book I picked up recently in hopes of reanimating what education I have on the subject (especially now that I, you know, write about music for a living).

All this is just set-up to say that I've made a routine of dreaming with classical music on. But it wasn't until last week that I had my first classical-music nightmare. After staying up all night on Thursday, and taking a catnap on Friday evening, I didn't stir when violins began pouring out of my clock radio.

Instead, I imagined the competing melodies were swords on a Tolkien battlefield, warriors dueling to the death. The more I listened, the more the music became a justification for this arrangement, a musical dramatization of the philosophy that might makes right and may the best man win--with sex tips from Straw Dogs, decor by Leni Riefenstahl Living, a will to power from the ages and a national slogan of "don't hate me because I'm beautiful," plus the general ranking of humanity, the belief in race, and whatever else you want to call it.

I sat up, and the words came to my lips: "Classical music is fascist."

Did I really believe this? Did I hate classical music? Did classical music hate the weak?

Now, in this life, it's important to grapple with why, exactly, you're not a fascist. Being anti-Nazi isn't enough. That's just a stance, or worse, a pose. When self-congratulating protesters shout down Ku Klux Klan members outside the state capitol, I'm not convinced that's anti-fascism at all. To be thoroughly and viscerally anti-fascist, you've got to reject in your viscera the very impulses of what you're "fighting." Which doesn't mean becoming a pacifist, necessarily, it just means never making peace with the rule of smallness.

People who are peaceful by nature might be luckier on this score, but I doubt it. Part of me thinks audiences find The Pianist so unspeakably moving because they don't know quite how to feel about the passively brave title character. The movie doesn't judge Wladyslaw Szpilman for his need to hide, any more than it judges his comrades in the Warsaw ghetto for their need to fight. Instead, it looks at history and violence from the point of view of a hiding place, and imagines music as its own kind of hiding place.

So now I wonder: Why didn't the movie's music move me more? Adrien Brody could make a Baathist sob over Szpilman's plight (I loved the Saturday Night Live sketch with Tracy Morgan and Bernie Mac bawling over it). But the effectiveness of his performance makes me painfully aware of how little Chopin had to do with it...

I'm not sure I can't educate myself out of this response. But I hope to. Loving music is a way of living, and to love well, you love more widely. If anything, I think the dream was less about my dislike of classical music than about my fear that some things are just beyond me. Maybe I'm not smart enough to figure out how to be happy. Maybe I mistrust things that are good. Maybe I'm worried that deep down, I have my own cruelty, my own fascist streak, and that classical music just opened up one subconscious hiding place for it...