1. I listened off and on over the Labor Day weekend to a countdown on the Symphony Hall channel on SiriusXM. The channel polled listeners to find out their favorite orchestral works, excluding symphonies and concertos. Symphony Hall is on Channel 78, so after compiling the results of their poll, the channel played its listeners' top 78 choices and counted them down and reached #1 this afternoon.
Right now, on Tuesday morning, as I write this post, the Symphony Hall channel is replaying the countdown and I'm enjoying having it on while I peck away on my laptop.
2. I got to thinking today about how listening to classical music feels like having a secret life. I'm not an expert. That's for sure. In fact, I've been thinking that I'd like to get straight in my mind once and for all when different composers lived and teach myself more about the different periods of classical music.
Listening to this music is a private pleasure. I don't listen with anyone else. It's not a subject I ever discuss with anyone else -- well, on occasion Debbie and I will talk about a piece of music or a composer.
In my private little (peculiar?) world, I play some kind of classical music radio station all through the night (unless I put on the Grateful Dead channel). A lot of my sense of myself and the state of my soul lives in compositions such as Bach's Goldberg Variations, Ralph Vaughn Williams' Fantasia Upon Greensleeves and his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Samuel Butler's Adagio for Strings, and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, to name a few.
I don't have words to explain how this is true, but these compositions and many others are not, for me, just background music, but are ways I can access deeper regions of my inner self in ways that are akin to religious. I've learned in my adulthood that this is how I respond to beauty, whatever form it takes.
3. Later in the evening, I turned my attention to rock music that has this same deep effect on me, to music and tunes that have very little in common with the sounds of Bach, Vaughn Williams, Butler, or Gershwin.
I turned to YouTube and repeatedly watched Joan Jett perform "Roadrunner" on the David Letterman Show and then watched a video from about fifteen years earlier of the Modern Lovers, the originators of this song, performing the song to rapidly flashing images of driving in and around Boston.
Then I watched a handful of invigorating videos of the B-52s, some from the band's early days and another more recent video.
Tina Weymouth's bass line in the Talking Head's song "Psycho Killer" has been playing over and over in my mind lately and I am wowed by the recently produced video of "Psycho Killer" featuring the great Saoirse Ronan and also watched a video about the making of the Ronan video and listened to its director, Mike Mills, share his vision of the song and the video itself. I especially enjoyed his unbridled praise of Saoirse Ronan.
So in my (peculiar?) private little world of what music moves me, I ended my session of deep feeling and enjoyment by watching for the four millionth time a live performance of AC/DC playing "Thunderstruck".
I have no words. No explanation. It just gets to me.
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