I'm also amazed by the fact that there are countless pieces of music I haven't even heard yet. For example, at a garage sale last summer, I bought a laundry basket full of classical music cassette tapes. It could have been the collection of a music critic. Here was-to name a few-every piano sonata of Beethoven, every piano concerto of Rachmaninoff, every violin concerto of Mozart. In all, my find amounted to over 130 separate cassettes and cost me five dollars. So even if I get bored with all pieces I know from my first 43 years of life, there is enough fodder here for at least that many more. In fact, it's comforting to think that as I enter my dotage and travel toward life's final exit, I will never be bored. Classical music will always be around because, well, it is ageless.

Unlike Rock music. About ten years ago, I went to see the Rolling Stones in concert. Through a fluke I ended up in the front row. A friend had brought binoculars. It was not a treat looking at Mick Jagger and Keith Richards up close. About 17 years ago, a friend of mind told me of something her nephew had said that upset her. The nephew had described The Beatles as the band that Paul McCartney was in before Wings. These two incidents remind me that with popular music at least, people's musical tastes tend to become fossilized around what they listened to in high school and college. Beyond that, they don't tend to broaden, instead they narrow, their musical preferences.

When I was a kid, the term the "generation gap" arose to describe the gap between the parents who came of age during World War II and their boomer children. Music tended to galvanize each camp and widen the distance between the two. Nowadays, musical fads change so rapidly that now the chasms have developed between people who are just a few years apart. Music now tends to separate rather than bring people together.

Maybe because you have to start early in order to become any good at it, classical music, on the other hand tends to bring the old and the young together. To really learn it, you have to study under a master. It's almost an apprenticeship and you learn not only technique but interpretation. When you study something like violin, for example, you are learning the wisdom of hundreds of years of trial and error. Once, when reviewing with my daughter what her violin teacher had taught her just about holding the bow, I wrote down over twenty different things to pay attention to-position of the bow on the strings, pressure of bow, movement of arm, position of wrist, etc. Recently she changed teachers, and her new one focuses almost as much on what emotions the composer is trying to convey and how to get the instrument to produce that affect.

Rock music (or pop, rather) is all about affect with little discipline behind it. Because you can buy a sampling keyboard with a rhythm machine built in, you can quickly whip up a dance track without having to understand anything about music theory. In classical music, by recapitulating the entire history of the instrument when learning to play, one has a firm foundation upon which to build new and interesting music.

Fur Elise is one of those pieces that all young pianist have to learn. It has a haunting melody built on a delightfully simply melody played in the right hand. It is actually from a set of bagatelles (translation, "Trifles") that Beethoven wrote around 1810. Though simple, and easily mastered by young hands, that should not make you think it is a mere piece of fluff. In fact, if you listen closely you can hear a nod to Mozart and a presentiment of the works of Chopin. And I hope my friend Phil Blair's daughter, Hattie, is getting as much pleasure out of learning it as I had listening to it again and writing about it tonight.

---

Beethoven Bio

MIDI Files

Alfred Brendel Performs