The Shock of Recognition: The books and music that have inspired me

By Barry Jones

'How much time do I have left? A hundred days? A thousand? If I knew I was going to die next week but could be taken to see The Marriage of Figaro tonight, would I go? Absolutely.'

In a long and generously lived life, Barry Jones has been on an endless quest to share the extraordinary and the beautiful, to encourage the pursuit of an abundant life of reading and listening.

Following the publication of A Thinking Reed, he was staggered by the response to his lists of the great works that have had the most profound effect on his life and thinking. Here he expands on those lists to write about the literature and the music that has inspired him. With no claims to objectivity, he urges us to take the plunge, to rattle the bars of the cage and expose ourselves to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler, Ravel and Stravinsky as well as the writings of Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Beckett among many more.

Eagerly awaited by his many followers, The Shock of Recognition is a deeply considered, richly rewarding and often very funny journey of the mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781741767698

Barry Jones

Barry Jones was a Labor member of the Victorian and Commonwealth parliaments, led the campaign to abolish the death penalty, and became Australia’s longest-serving minister for science from 1983 to 1990. His books include Sleepers, Wake!, A Thinking Reed, Dictionary of World Biography, The Shock of Recognition, and, most recently, What is to be Done: political engagement and saving the planet. He received a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia’s highest award, in 2014, and, at the age of 89, is a ‘living national treasure’.

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1

LIFE OF MY MIND

There is another world, but it is in this one.

—W.B. Yeats

The great challenge of art is for us to find out what it is to be fully human—to explore a greater range and depth of personal experience: observation, understanding, creativity, imagination, empathy for the remote from our lives. High culture, with all its complexity and inevitable elitism, can take us to places where we do not expect to go, and has some aura of danger, exploring outer space or the terra (terror?) incognita of inner space. It can be life changing, producing ‘the oceanic feeling’ and introducing us to transcendence (orgasm without the sex?).

All my life I have had a passion, compulsion even, to persuade people to explore the great works of the Western tradition, shaped by my own experience of how creativity at the highest level, with its exploration of complexity, is life changing. This tradition includes science, mathematics, architecture, music, literature, painting and sculpture. Exposure to natural phenomena runs in parallel.

The Shock of Recognition is a challenge to the reader and listener to pursue ‘the abundant life’, to rattle the bars of the cage, to get out of an aesthetic shoe box, by investment of time and concentration, connecting with transcendent creativity in music and literature, pursuing intellectual and aesthetic engagement, aiming to experience excitement, satisfaction, happiness, but often taking some risks.

The term ‘shock of recognition’* has been used to describe the impact of self-discovery after exposure to, or immersion in, the challenging, the transcendental, the uncanny, relating the specific to the universal, the immediate to the timeless, the individual to all humanity.

Exploring another world, even if it is in this one, depends on access, stimulation, encouragement. Confronting the unknown often provokes a haunting but completely unexpected sense of the familiar: ‘I have been here before.’ Paradoxically, familiar faces, places or landscapes can sometimes seem unsettling and strange. Known and unknown are intertwined, the ‘self’ and the ‘not self’ overlap, the spiritual and the physical, the specific and the universal, the immediate and the timeless, the individual to all humanity, all become inextricably linked.

Imagination can link the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard, the relationships between past < now > future and here < > not here.

I have been on an endless quest, searching for meaning, waiting for God (or Godot), coming to terms with death, the entry price for life, exploring the tensions of time, space, infinity and eternity, with an insatiable appetite for collecting and disseminating knowledge, communicating experience, analysing evidence, risking the unknown, seeking the transcendent and universal in spirituality, creativity and aesthetics, exploring the limits of human capacity, celebrating the extraordinary and the beautiful, in creativity or nature, experiencing the passion, pain, even danger, of great music, with its moods of exaltation and risks of falling, the power and penetration of words, the search for love and identification of ‘the other’, understanding linkages, making connections. I often feel like Homer’s Odysseus on a long voyage of discovery, making a connection between me–here–now and everyone–everywhere–all time, balancing the sublime and unique with the banal and obvious, recognising the tension between the unique and the universal. It helps me make sense of my own experience, and reinforces a sense of connectedness (‘we are not alone’) with the unfamiliar and remote.

I could be accused, as an ageing white male, of being unduly Europhile in my tastes. Proffering lists of important works, choosing Bach’s Preludes and Fugues over, say, folk music or eastern traditional music, may be seen, in a deconstructionist age, as condescending, hierarchical—even patriarchal. (I concede, at once, that I am far more familiar with the culture of Europe [including North America and Australia] than other continents—but I have travelled extensively and eagerly seek out the work of Asian, African and South American artists looking for achievement comparable, say, to Bach, Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Dante, just as I seek their equivalents in recent centuries, anywhere.)

Despite appearances, The Shock of Recognition is not a general guidebook to literature or music. It makes no claims to objectivity, and there are significant omissions. Its common theme is how specific works have transformed my understanding of the universe, and that exposure to the exceptional, the transcendent, may enable others to experience something similar.

My readers will have far more exposure to Western expression than any other, and while I might hope for a Japanese translation (as with my book Sleepers, Wake!), I know that my target audience will be in the West.

I experience the ‘Aha!’ phenomenon when exposed to something unexpected in aesthetics, just as I do in nature. I collect Japanese art but recognise that much of it is deliberately minimalist, with a minute concentration on form and texture, rarely seeking to overwhelm or, apparently, reach out to the universal in the way that great Western art does.

FROM SIMPLE TO COMPLEX: Developing brain plasticity and capacity

As animals, and humans, evolve and socialise, their communications appear to develop from simple to complex. Animals communicate by calls, cries, varieties of noises indicating fear, hunger, anger, surprise, desire. Birds and fish have mastered navigation with a skill that beggars our imagination. Some, notably birds and male cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), have mastered song. Humans must have begun communicating with grunts, cries and groans, which evolved into song, long before the development of vocabulary, grammar and—later—abstract thought.

Extinction of our distant cousins the Neanderthals remains one of prehistory’s great mysteries: they were intelligent, social, with big brains, strength, language and skill as toolmakers. Anthropologists conclude that the factors leading to the triumph of Homo sapiens sapiens included a capacity for imagination, especially to plan for the future, using symbolic or abstract imagery and language to create narratives of the past, including a creation myth, which became the core of religious belief, art and the evolution of culture.

Tackling complexity is, with humans, not just a matter of taste but an essential evolutionary developmental mechanism, which strengthens brain plasticity and capacity, and wards off loss of cognition and the onset of Alzheimer’s more effectively than computer games, Sudoku, crossword puzzles or jigsaws. Arts and music, especially composition, performance and interpretation, are not just important, they are central to developing human capacity at the highest level.

Animals have competed for space and nutrition for hundreds of millions of years. Most species have become extinct. The survivors develop complex techniques to find a habitat and protect their young.

When we take the trouble, we can observe how birds demonstrate ascending levels of complexity. In cities, we can fail to notice them, but if we observe we can see them singly or in flocks, and as nest builders, then we become aware of their distinctive songs, their colours, flying patterns, navigations skills and behaviour, whether cooperative or competitive. It is all there to observe but we must look, listen and think first.

We have been very slow to recognise the brain’s capacity for dealing with complexity and how pursuit of challenges transforms lives. It is common for people to say of a book or painting: ‘It’s too hard for me.’ When the answer to the question ‘What music do you like?’ is: ‘Anything really’, this suggests a lack of engagement.

Marketers work on the assumption that humans can only concentrate for about two and a half minutes, about the length of most pop songs. This is a pessimistic view, suggesting that encouraging people to take on, say, Schubert’s String Quintet in C major (D. 956), which runs to fifty minutes, might be doomed, and that exposure to the Taj Mahal, or Hamlet, or Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel might result in a catatonic state after 150 seconds.

Millions of people acknowledge that their musical tastes were formed in their teens and have barely changed since then. This is in sharp contrast to their language skills, analytical capacity, and ability to respond to new and unexpected challenges.

This demonstrates Roger Sperry’s Nobel Prize winning research about the different capacities of left and right hemispheres in the brain (left: language, speech, logic, numbers, calculation, specific memory; right: pattern and spatial recognition, music, visual imagery, contextual memory). Both hemispheres contribute to the processing of music.

Masterpieces in music, both in the Western and Eastern traditions, are characterised by extraordinary complexity, with permutations and combinations paralleling, and expanding, brain function, combining memorable tonality, rhythmic structure and emotional power. This miracle involves combining labyrinthine means with a clear, unambiguous message and an inner logic.

Sometimes people say, ‘I tried music—but didn’t progress past strumming a few common chords on the guitar.’ We may accept this as understandable. However, it would raise concern if people said, ‘I’ll use language—but only the 500 most common words’ or ‘I’ll use mathematics—but only simple arithmetic’, or ‘I’ll use a limited range of the visual spectrum.’

The appeal of simple music is, in part, a reinforcement of the familiar. Simple music is easy to teach, learn, remember, play with others and it can reinforce kinship or group connections. Complex music involves sustained concentration and discipline—whether in performing or listening—for more than a two and a half minute burst (including repetition.) Jazz is often complex, requiring virtuosity, diversity, stamina and originality of a high order.

Contemporary tastes reflect the times, with significant group reinforcement and bonding: each choice of music or reading is likely to be familiar or understandable to others in the age cohort.

There are serious class and age divisions in cultural consumption,* reinforced by a split-level education system, where private schools teach music and encourage performance skills, and most public schools don’t teach music and lack the resources to provide access to concerts, art galleries, museums, libraries. There has been no will to teach music and no money for it after decades of education budgets being cut.

The IT revolution offers an unprecedented, exponential increase in access to the wonders of the universe. The iPhone is a gateway to the wisdom of the ages, with unprecedented capacity to explore sounds, images, data, concepts and experience. Despite all this, observation suggests that the iPhone is used at a tiny fraction of its capacity, to reinforce the personal, the immediate and the numbingly familiar: ‘Where are you now? Will you be late? Did you pick up the vegetables?’

On public transport these days, a majority of passengers under the age of fifty are clutching iPhones or wired for sound, seemingly oblivious to the world around them. Sensory assault may be part of the attraction, despite its obvious linkage with hearing loss.

We are increasingly used to instant responses, for example in social media, and this preferences the reactive over the reflective. If we were in a society where most members of a random group were gazing at an icon, telling their rosary beads or reading the same newspaper, we would recognise, even be disturbed by, the very high degree of convergence.

Sport is an outstanding illustration of the importance of shared language, shared experience and shared memory. When people discuss cricket or Australian rules football, they do not have to explain a context, to provide background material about bats, balls, the identity of the teams or names of leading players. Often sporting commitment is hereditary, tribal, central to cultural identity, and may go back for generations.

It is a matter of observation, confirmed by sheer numbers, that the familiar and predictable are psychologically satisfying and a vital factor in social bonding.

Attempting to discuss The Iliad, Hamlet or The Marriage of Figaro proceeds on completely different bases. It is risky to assume that potential readers or listeners have any prior knowledge or emotional engagement, even after twelve years at school, followed by tertiary education.

THE MASTERPIECE VERSUS THE BESTSELLER

Approaching the arts generally—music in particular, but also literature—suggests an analogy with cathedrals, and their two axes, vertical and horizontal. The vertical pulls our gaze upward, looking through the vault towards the stars, reaching out for the transcendental and numinous, rapture and the unattainable—for some, Heaven. Pursuing the vertical is difficult, complex, dangerous, involving travelling alone, coming to terms with the nameless, the aspirational, the abstract, the unique. The horizontal is comfortable, familiar, reassuring, earthbound, physical, less challenging and safer, with no fear of falling. In a secular, technological, materialist and self-absorbed society, there may be risk in even mentioning the cathedral analogy, since so many people have been deeply alienated, even traumatised, by their childhood experience of religion.

There are several reasons for reading masterpieces: to understand more of the human experience and how we relate to huge events beyond our control, to grasp the complexity of the lives of great characters, to be excited by exposure to a masterpiece, the ‘Wow!’ or ‘Aha!’ factor. It is not compulsory to read War and Peace. If its excitement, grandeur and insights elude you at first, then look at a film, DVD or listen to a talking book.

In a highly materialist age, value is often confused with selling power. Sales of Agatha Christie’s crime stories are said to be exceeded only by the Bible, the Koran and Shakespeare. Christie’s play The Mousetrap has been performed in London every night since 25 November 1952. This does not make it more important than Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which has been performed regularly, but not continuously, for nearly 2500 years. Theatre owners and careful readers have different points of view.

We expect, demand even, elitism from Olympic athletes and other sporting heroes but use the word dismissively in other areas, especially the arts and research. Australia appears to be the only country where the word ‘academic’ (as in, ‘But that’s only academic …’) is used as a pejorative.

Jonathan Swift wrote, ‘It was a brave man who first ate an oyster’. It would be heartless and trivialising to divide people into two categories: those who love oysters and those who are repelled even by the thought of them, and yet it illustrates a deep dichotomy in matters of taste. Class, education, experience, location are all major determinants. As the Romans used to say: ‘De gustibus non est disputandum’ / ‘In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.’

The pluralist / deconstructionist / post-modern theory of knowledge rejects hierarchies of knowledge and asserts the democratic mantra that—as with votes in elections—every opinion, every taste is of equal value, rejecting the idea of people like the American critic Harold Bloom, or me, who insist that there is a ‘Western canon’ which sets benchmarks. No, say the deconstructionists, the paintings of Banksy, the mysterious British graffiti artist, are just as good as Raphael, hip-hop performances have the same worth as Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 14, op. 131.

While popular culture is highly marketable (and often exploitative), it may have a relatively short shelf life. In the long term, the appeal of the masterpiece transcends time, history and geography. A Bach festival will sell out in Melbourne, Montréal, Moscow, Munich, Matsuyama, Montevideo or Mexico City. Hamlet has been played throughout Europe and the world for centuries. Don Quixote has been translated into forty-eight languages. Films of the classics have achieved cult status. Queues would start forming anywhere now for exhibitions of Leonardo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Velázquez or van Gogh. Cultural tourism is flourishing, and often the oldest places have the most powerful appeal—but it may take decades before people respond to these challenges.

TIME MANAGEMENT AND THE ARTS

Time is the medium in which we live, the only irreplaceable resource. But there is a paradox: time management, historically, was an instrument of external control. Friedrich Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx, argued that the clock, not the steam engine, was the central tool of the Industrial Revolution. The imposition of discipline by the manager in the factory system was essential to the model of mass production established by Henry Ford. It was central to the organisation of schools, and in public transport. Traditionally, value has always been externally conferred, usually by a superior (parent, teacher or employer). We find it virtually impossible to impute it to ourselves. Ideally, education would encourage development and redefinition of a new sense of ‘time-use value’. There is little evidence that this is happening.

Individual time management should be liberating, but in practice many feel a psychological inhibition because of self-doubt about judgment. Even more people feel uneasy about the passage of time and have a desperate need to desensitise themselves. They ‘kill time’ by alcohol and drug abuse, especially smoking. Also, some reject objective, clock, or ‘linear’ time, as Isaac Newton described it, and prefer to experience subjective, spatial time, a concept of time in which it moves backwards, forward and sideways, brilliantly illustrated in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Capacity to manage time is the major distinction between those who exercise power and those on whom it is imposed—the ‘Who/Whom?’ question that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin often raised.

Complex music involves solitary exploration, confronting the unexpected, stretching beyond reach, underlining self-knowledge, strength, enlargement and awe. But it is profoundly individual, unless you are performing, in a choir, orchestra or chamber group. Great literature is the same, except for the time factor. We read at our own pace, but time and music are interwoven.

Addressing high culture, making personal choices rather than adopting group preferences, involves setting priorities, based on time budgeting and the self-management of time, recognising that reading will sometimes be like gear changing on a car—we might be in first gear, working through dialogue, philosophy or highly technical material, while we can hurtle through a battle scene or a landscape.

The size and complexity of great works, such as Michelangelo’s Creation and Last Judgment, or Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, or Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, should not be intimidating, but it helps to do some preliminary investigating first.

War and Peace daunts many potential readers who say: ‘It’s an enormous work. It will take me ages to finish.’ I urge them to be brave.

The Penguin edition of the translation of War and Peace by Pevear and Volokhonsky runs to 1296 pages, slightly longer than J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, also very complex, but an international bestseller, far shorter than George R.R. Martin’s seven-volume work Game of Thrones, and less than half the length of J.K. Rowling’s complete Harry Potter series.

I suggest trying a variety of approaches to War and Peace. One way might be to read the book several times, in different ways, first a speed-reading exercise, as quickly as possible, to provide a ‘bird’s eye’ view, to survey the terrain, followed by closer examination, including a ‘worm’s eye’ reading of detail and individual character.

For encouragement, and to give a sense of proportion, I suggest that a full, detailed, careful reading should have some relationship with the length of the powerful film of War and Peace (1967–68) by Sergei Bondarchuk, eight hours four minutes in its uncut version. The Penguin edition of the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky runs to 1296 pages. Depending on reading speed, it could be completed in a single day, assuming between twelve and eighteen uninterrupted hours.

But, once War and Peace is absorbed by the reader, it will stay in the mind for life. I have known people who re-read it every year. I have read it six times, always with excitement. Dragging the process out over two or three months would be sheer torture and doomed to failure.

Similarly with Hamlet. The play is Shakespeare’s longest and Kenneth Branagh’s uncut film version (1996) ran for four hours. I would encourage readers to follow the text as they play a DVD.

I emphasise the importance of translations in following chapters. Readers have many options to choose from before finding the translation that suits them best. It’s worth spending some time in a good bookshop and comparing versions to find one that appeals. Translators have different approaches. Should the emphasis be on fidelity, a word for word literal equivalent, or should it be creative, trying to convey the rhythm, sound, humour, pathos, drama of the remote original, so that modern readers can respond from the starting point of their own world. Twenty English translations of Homer’s Iliad have been published since 1951, confirming that the work stimulates fresh insights, and the determination of a translator to express a different perspective.

I have a strong, probably obsessive, drive to fill the unforgiving minute with insatiable curiosity about the world and passion for experience and aesthetic excitement. How much time do I have left? A hundred days? A thousand? Young people may have twenty thousand. But that is no justification for postponement.

If I knew that I was going to die next week, but could be taken to see The Marriage of Figaro tonight, would I go? Absolutely.

THE NUMINOUS AND ‘STENDHAL’S SYNDROME’

I am constantly exposed to ‘the numinous’, a sense of the overwhelming, unique and inexplicable, experiencing awe about human capacity and the incomparable complexity and beauty of nature. As I wrote in my autobiography A Thinking Reed (Allen & Unwin, 2006), I react to the numinous with

a shuddering in my spine, changed breathing, faster heartbeat, heightened emotion, the lightning strike of imagination … familiarity with … places, sights and sounds which transcend the normal and quotidian. This sense, which bursts beyond rationality, often explodes in contact with creativity—music, literature, painting, sculpture, but also with landscape, nature and the night sky.

In my excitement about transcendence, I often experience ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’,* named for the French novelist, also known as ‘the Florence syndrome’, a coinage by psychologists in 1979. This overpowering reaction, which in extreme cases may include palpitations or fainting, is caused by exposure to great art, historic associations or natural beauty. Stendhal experienced it after visiting the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, seeing the tombs of Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo and Rossini, Dante’s empty grave and frescoes by Giotto and Gaddi.

Stendhal’s syndrome can result from the physical impact of sites like Machu Picchu or Iguaçu or Angkor Wat or Antarctica or Brittany or Uluru, or the power of music (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner), writers (Homer, Shakespeare, Proust), a transcendental painting (van Eyck, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt, Velázquez), or sculpture or architecture (Michelangelo, Bernini, Moore, Serra, Le Corbusier, Utzon, Foster, Gehry).

A less acute form of Stendhal’s syndrome can be experienced in ‘the shudder’, ‘the shiver’, ‘frisson’ in French, all terms used by great writers, including Coleridge, Victor Hugo, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, or W.H. Auden to describe their physical reaction to the unexpected and transcendental in art—sometimes familiarly called ‘a hit’.

It is parallel to the ‘Eureka effect’, first described by Archimedes, or the ‘aha!’ phenomenon, or an epiphany, a sudden understanding of the incomprehensible.

ON MISSION

Apart from music, including opera, The Shock of Recognition is devoted to literature, especially novels. I will have to postpone writing at length about drama and poetry, both personal passions, along with painting, sculpture and architecture. However, there are some anomalous inclusions—Dante as poet, Montaigne as essayist, Edward Gibbon as historian of Rome, James Boswell as biographer of Samuel Johnson, and some plays which may be read as novels, for example by William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett, just as some novels or short stories can be read as plays.

To keep The Shock of Recognition at manageable length, I have held back from discussing major writers in English whose works are easy to access, and which have been serialised on television or have become much admired films. But a list of recommended books would have to include the masterpieces of Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814); Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847); Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1859) and Great Expectations (1861); Middlemarch (1872) by George Eliot; the Barchester novels by Anthony Trollope; and works by P.G. Wodehouse, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene and John le Carré.

I feel some ambivalence about Henry James, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster: I used to read them avidly, remember their books clearly, but have no wish to revisit.

I have also omitted the great Americans—Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, John dos Passos, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Don DeLillo.

I feel half-apologetic for omitting Australian authors, other than Patrick White and J.M. Coetzee, both discussed in Chapter 17, Exiles. I set out a list of my favourite Australian novels in A Thinking Reed. Tom Keneally, Helen Garner, Tim Winton, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, Frank Moorhouse, Gerald Murnane, Peter Temple, Barry Maitland, Alex Miller, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright, Anna Funder, Michelle de Kretser, Kate Grenville, Marion Halligan are all outstanding writers—but their starting point is (mostly) contemporary, and from home base, familiar to the reader and easy to grasp. In The Shock of Recognition my emphasis is on ‘the Other’, the remote, the challenging, the uncanny.

GETTING OUT OF PLATO’S CAVE

In The Republic, Plato, the idealist Athenian philosopher, presented his ‘allegory of the cave’. In Book VII, Plato’s mentor Socrates describes to his pupil, Glaucon, a darkened cave, with a long entrance leading to daylight and the natural world. The cave’s inhabitants are there for life, chained, but also conditioned through habit. The shadow plays they see on the walls constitute reality to them and they are unable to explore the larger world outside. (In addition to incapacity, they may lack motivation.) They know nothing of life outside the cave. They would be blinded by the sun, confused by wind and rain, vegetation, animals, baffled by the moon and stars.

The metaphor of leaving the cave has a powerful literary parallel in Dante’s Inferno, which ends: ‘And then we came out to see again the stars.’ The cave metaphor seemed eerily prophetic in the era, first, of film, then television, then computing, computer games and smartphones.

Getting people out of Plato’s cave involves encouraging them to confront ‘the shock of recognition’ in unfamiliar, challenging phenomena, grasping the range of human diversity, trying to reconcile depth of understanding and breadth of experience, distinguishing between the macro and the micro.

When I become preoccupied with a subject, the urge to share experience becomes irresistible, even if my audience shows palpable reluctance. My enthusiasm to provide lists of books read, places visited and music heard is not self-praise for my energy or perception, but encouragement for others to take the plunge, and expose themselves to Homer, Montaigne, Dostoevsky, Monteverdi, Mozart, Stravinsky, comets and the Milky Way, the Amazon, the Great Barrier Reef, humming birds, parrots, lyrebirds, whales, elephants, crayfish, orchids and tulips, cherry blossom time in Japan.

English literature has a recurrent theme of the ‘secret garden’, where a traveller or observer slips through a gate in the ancient city wall into a world remote from his or her own experience. In Oxford, in part a grim industrial town, one can step from a road dominated by buses, trucks, cars and motorbikes into a timeless Arcadian landscape. Magdalen’s Deer Park looks like a Turner painting but the scene could be medieval: so with Christ Church Meadow. The romantic gardens in New College have a touch of drama and the unexpected. Exploring Oxford is an epiphany, with a transforming quality taking me into a time warp outside previous experience.

I cannot explain this rationally and expect never to get over it.

_____________

* The phrase was coined by the American novelist Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick, in an essay on the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1851). Edmund Wilson’s anthology of American literary criticism, The Shock of Recognition (1943), had a powerful influence on me as an adolescent.

* Kim Williams’ passionate essay about the importance of studying music as a major factor in personal development appears in his Rules of Engagement (Miegunyah Press, 2014)

* Stendhal, the pen-name of Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), was author of Le Rouge et le Noir / Scarlet and Black (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme / The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) v.

2

GREAT MUSIC: SIXTY WORKS

In A Thinking Reed, I wrote: ‘Of all the arts, music is the most powerful, dangerous, challenging and exposing. It would be painful to live without it because it is my window into the mysteries of time, existence and experience. But it leaves me vulnerable as often as it elevates me to heights of emotion and understanding. I choose to live with the risk.’

Hearing is deeply integrated in the central nervous system, even more so than seeing. In foetal development, the ear comes first, by the forty-fifth day, months before the eye.* Neurologists argue that sound penetrates the body and stirs the emotions more than light, shape and colour. Rhythm and melody appear to be implanted in foetal memory. Babies respond to music (and voices) heard in the womb.

The Brain That Changes Itself (2007) by the Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2008) by the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, both very influential and widely read, emphasise the unique role of music in encouraging brain plasticity, its extraordinary effect on the minds of dementia sufferers, or the bodies of those frozen with Parkinson’s disease.

Pursuing music should be a great adventure, urging us on and on along the complexity road, with rising expectations. Progression from a nursery song to folk music, popular song, gospel or country and western involves increasing complexity: going further, to sonatas, concertos, symphonies, chamber music or opera, jazz or Indian ragas, involves far more.

We are used to spectacular, almost inconceivable, complexity in visual imagery, but have very modest ambitions about auditory stimuli. We confuse hearing (essentially passive) and listening (essentially active). This applies not only to music but also to the use of language—often limited, cliché ridden, violent, repetitive, shaped by technology and simplified to binary code.

Music, as artistic expression, is intangible, existing only in time. Time, as an irreplaceable resource, has to be competed for. Hearers become consumers, classified according to their demographic group. Music promoters emphasise product—‘songs’, as they say on iPhones or the iPad—short, discrete works (sung or not) that can be presented in any order, but not long, complex works such as symphonies, concertos, sonatas, ragas or operas. Time becomes part of shared experience: consumption is inevitably aimed towards a mass, collective response.

To me, music is essentially transformational, often ecstatic, rather than mere entertainment. It is an epiphany, a sudden exposure to the numinous. But many people appear to be alienated by the complexity and power of serious music. Nicolas Rothwell put it brilliantly:

… I cannot fail to register how desperately modern man needs music, craves music, cannot bear even the briefest space of silence, as though without the beat we would be forced to listen to the rushing of our blood—and solitude itself, which once paved the way to insight, has become an enemy: indeed, it is a bitter truth that our kind today is afraid of isolation, we crowd together with each other, and can hardly stand to be alone for very long.*

Through the media, and in shops, restaurants, cars and public transport, we are saturated with music, mostly popular, simple, repetitive and rhythmic. In some places, recorded music is compulsory: management will not turn if off (or down). Music has become a traded commodity.

John le Carré, in his novel A Most Wanted Man (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008), describes the Hamburg railway station where station authorities play classical music, boomed ‘at full blast … from a battery of well-aimed loud speakers. Its purpose, far from spreading feelings of peace and wellbeing among its listeners, is to send them packing’. Canadian railway authorities use the same technique to reduce vandalism. In Melbourne, playing Frank Sinatra CDs has been used to clear underground car parks.

In his essay ‘An Empire of Ugliness’ (1997), Simon Leys relates a parable about the disturbance and consternation in an Australian coffee shop, when, by chance, patrons heard Mozart’s clarinet quintet on the radio, until a baffled customer changes stations to restore ‘at once the more congenial noises, which everyone could again comfortably ignore’. The power of great art to penetrate, to disturb, must be resisted to maintain normality. Leys contends: ‘The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.’

In the first edition of A Thinking Reed I set out a list headed ‘Great Music’, a self-imposed limit of twenty-five works by the seventeen composers I thought of as my ‘A team’. In later editions this expanded to twenty-eight works. I was amazed and touched by the number of people who told me that they had worked their way through the list systematically by buying CDs or going to concerts, and how much they had enjoyed the experience.

On reflection, I was over-cautious and now propose two lists, the first, sixty great works by thirty composers (below), the second, a list of twenty-six operas (page 112) that should be experienced.

I am all too conscious that the list is exclusively European, that thirty-seven of the works are from the German-Austrian tradition and only sixteen have been written in the past century. Only two composers are female. Inevitably the choice is subjective: these are the works that have had the greatest impact on me, generating excitement, ecstasy, sometimes anguish. They feed my inner life. But my choices can also be justified objectively by pointing to the frequency of performance and recording of most music listed, not just in Europe and North America.

In this and the following chapters, I have identified not only outstanding music, but transcendental performances as well. The film The Bucket List (2007), starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, stimulated interest in creating lists of experiences to be achieved before one kicked the bucket. My text about great composers and their works is interleaved