Music for a bad trip
During a little online research for a preconcert lecture Friday, I came across this article on Mozart and Haydn which concluded with the following paragraph:
Some years ago, I was discussing music with two friends, one of them a distinguished contemporary composer. We were chewing over the following peculiar question, peculiar especially since it concerned an experience none of us had had in approximately three decades: If you had taken LSD and suddenly realized your trip was heading seriously south, what music would you put on the stereo to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons? All three of us agreed without hesitation: a Haydn quartet. Almost any Haydn quartet.
Which got me to thinking, taking aside the LSD, what music do you turn to "to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons"? I'm not talking music to sooth or relax to, I'm talking about the stuff that fundamentally grounds you and gives you that deep and firm understanding of the rightness of living and your place in the world. For me, Bach Well Tempered Clavier puts molecules back in order when the universe is going astray. You?
Some years ago, I was discussing music with two friends, one of them a distinguished contemporary composer. We were chewing over the following peculiar question, peculiar especially since it concerned an experience none of us had had in approximately three decades: If you had taken LSD and suddenly realized your trip was heading seriously south, what music would you put on the stereo to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons? All three of us agreed without hesitation: a Haydn quartet. Almost any Haydn quartet.
Which got me to thinking, taking aside the LSD, what music do you turn to "to restore your emotional equilibrium and silence your demons"? I'm not talking music to sooth or relax to, I'm talking about the stuff that fundamentally grounds you and gives you that deep and firm understanding of the rightness of living and your place in the world. For me, Bach Well Tempered Clavier puts molecules back in order when the universe is going astray. You?
Labels: music and psychology, polling blog readers
posted by Sarah at
9:00 AM
8 Comments:
Vivaldi Bassoon Concertos, with your very own John Miller, Neville Marriner / ASMF.
Bach, Art of the Fugue, really helps ground me when I need some time to myself.
Yes, Bach, especially the fugues...They are perfect works of art. Playing them with respect and care requires that I empty my mind and simply be in the music for a while. Invariably I am refreshed and strengthened after half an hour at the piano with WTC.
I guess I'm just weird, but the 18th century isn't a focus, it becomes an annoyance of predictability.
I actually use the "chaos" of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as a focus. I figure if I can hold onto the "7 plus or minus 2" of that score, I can hold onto anything in my head.
Debussy's Faun is another piece that helps focus, as my brain images its way through the modes and layers to the whole tone scale, catching the points where it switches back to a full tonality from those moments.
Mahler 4
rite of spring!!! wow... one of my favorite works in the repertoire, but not one for a bad trip (maybe the early-childhood "fantasia" associations.)
Yeah, Fantasia helped. :)
When I was 17, on a snowy day here outside DC, I went to the local college library (George Mason U) and pulled out the score of Rite and an LP copy and impressed myself by following along and mostly not getting lost. :)
Well, I'm going to answer this mostly because I have a very different answer. More than a decade ago, when I was an young officer in the Navy and had some terrible, terrible days, coming home to my apartment and sitting in a chair in my darkened living room with a rye and ginger highball in one hand and Dave Brubeck's Time Out was able to restore order and peace to the world.
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