WTF is a “Dvořák” by Gerrit Postema
I’m going to preface this by saying that although I have a small amount of knowledge of “classical” music, I by no means know enough to debate the finer points. This is a sort of layman’s introduction to another layman’s favorite symphony. I played in orchestra in middle and high school, and I was decent enough at playing string bass that I was able to play in my city’s youth symphony and all state orchestra. That being said, after spending a shit-ton of time practicing and playing “classical” music, I still knew nothing about it. There’s this weird dichotomy between a) being a part of a large orchestra, focusing on your part, constantly checking for audio clues from the other sections, frantically trying to make it look like you know what you’re doing and b) actually listening to an orchestra concert. Despite all my time spent playing classical music, I could never make it through an orchestra concert without dozing off, and I sure as hell didn’t listen to classical music in my spare time. I was mainly into electronic music, often the experimental and ambient kind, with artists like Burial, Tim Hecker, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Crystal Castles being some of my favorites. I thought that electronic music was merely the continuation of classical music and that electronic was simply free of the physical constraints that fettered the aspirations of classical music. And then I seriously sat down and listened to Dvořák’s 9th Symphony (subtitled “From the New World”) for the first real time, even though I’d played various movements of that symphony and seen it performed live. While there is something to be said for the stark reality of a concert-hall performance, listening to a piece of music in your headphones on your own terms is something special and completely different. I expected to be bored by it despite my nostalgia for the times when I performed it. I was not. It sounded like an entirely different piece. The recording that I listened to, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, was as lush and lavishly recorded and rendered as any Hyperdub release. I also realized that it was beautiful. I had spent such a long time away in the equally interesting land of bleak soundscapes and post-modernist explorations of Daniel Lopatin that I had forgotten the way 16
some music made me feel. I felt captured in the first movement. I cried at the beauty of the second movement, followed eagerly along with the third, and felt the triumphal climax of the final movement. I remembered how beautiful music and the abstract emotions that it elicits can be. And Dvořák’s music is just that: pure emotion. This is not looking at it from a classical perspective, this is looking at it from a modern perspective. I’m not using its own set of classical standards to judge it; I’m comparing it to artists like Kanye, Animal Collective, Burial, and Kendrick Lamar. Dvořák still holds his own. Dvořák’s music is almost shockingly accessible to the ears of someone who listens to current experimental music. It’s not harsh, but it’s not canned chord progressions and lowest-common-denominator, four-on-the-floor beats either. It’s beautifully complex but also beautifully sweet and resonant and resolving when it needs to be. This isn’t an article meant to push the classical genre onto a “modern” audience; this is merely an article extolling the virtues of a piece of music that I sincerely love.
