It Beat Me You Guys. The Bach Book Beat Me.

And I have feelings about that. Consider this a wonky part two to the previous letter.

I read another 50 pages and I only felt worse.

And so I want to spend time talking about reading goals and pressure and art and feelings.

Ok. So I really wanted to read this book on Bach. I wanted to read this book really really bad and I only made it through about a fifth of the way through. I certainly learned things about one of my favorite musical minds ever of all time, but I also learned something else about myself—something I’ve been coming to grips with over the last six months, which is that not every book is going to be for you. Not every song is going to be for you. This may or may not be controversial, but I’m one of those people who believes not every piece of art is for everyone. I believe art as a whole is for everyone, but no two people are going find the same amount of meaning in the same artwork. Let alone meaning to begin with. Make sense? Here’s an example.

Not too long ago, I went to the Harvard Art Museums. In one of the galleries there is a sculpture by the late Richard Serra. Serra’s work is challenging and to some, boring. I understand that. It is in essence, a piece of metal leaning up against a wall or erected in a space. This particular piece sits in the corner of one of the galleries and I was deeply taken by it. I never got to see Serra at Gagosian where his walls filled rooms big enough to be warehouses. I never got to look up at them and get lost within them, so it was moving to see this relatively small and unassuming piece of art leaning up against a white plaster wall. Serra’s work transformed the feeling of a space itself by using material to change the configuration of a room; by dividing and cutting it up in various ways. I’m not an art critic nor am I an art historian by any stretch, but in the little research I’ve done since he passed that’s what I’ve gathered.

As I stood and looked at the piece in the room, I found myself looking around it. What was behind the sculpture? Is it hiding something? I wanted to touch it. The material looked cool. I bet if I was able to touch it I would have felt a little chill against my fingertips. I stood in front of it, gazing at it and trying to commune with it for maybe about 10 minutes. Not a long time, but enough time to allow for my senses to feel something in response to its presence. As I stood, folks were walking in and out of the room. Some loudly, others quietly. Almost none of them stopped to look at the piece for more than a moment. Part of me was frustrated by that because I respect audience members and participants in the artistic experience who challenge themselves. I really like people who go out of their way to experience art they never would have otherwise been exposed to. You’re never gonna learn anything if you don’t try new things, which brings me back to Johann Sebastian Bach and this goddamn book.

I’ve loved Bach for as long as I can remember. It is entirely possible his music was some of the first I ever truly loved. My grandparents used to take me to the Symphony all the time when I was a kid and they would play classical music in the car wherever we went. As a young kid I didn’t have as much appreciation for it as I do now of course, but Bach stood out. His pieces were bombastic and dramatic and whimsical and awe-inspiring all at once. They are what I can now recognize as representative of the vast expanse of human emotion.

One of the finest performances of a musical composition I’ve ever witnessed was the Boston Baroque Orchestra doing Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The memory is crystal clear to me still. It was a Sunday afternoon and I went with a close friend at the time. I had never felt anything like it. It’s one of those pieces of music that should be on everyone’s list to see performed in a live setting. You must see it. That, and Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. You must. There is something deep and God-like about the B Minor Mass. Of the things I learned before I pronounced defeat, I grabbed onto one idea Gardiner mentions in the beginning. It had to do with the purpose of why a piece of music was written in the first place.

In Bach’s day if a piece of music was Perfect, God was “immanent”. I love that word. Immanent. I talked about this in the last newsletter. Immanence implies action, something to be done, something is about to happen, something is coming. One of the things I gathered in the ~115 pages I was able to navigate my way through was the gravity of Lutheran’s beliefs. This kind of apocalyptic level of fear ran through many of the teachings and so, as I understand it, so-called Perfect music was purifying; it was a way of touching the divine or perhaps bringing the divine down onto the Earth in someway.

I was out for a walk the other night and I stood under a willow tree. I love willow trees because of the way the branches fall around you. The feeling of being held or encased by the tree in its warmth is such a nice feeling. I like to feel that way by the art I consume. I want to feel engulfed in it. I want to be surrounded, to be fully enraptured by a work of art. I need all five senses to be activated in order to feel fulfilled. I understand this may seem like I’m asking a lot of the artists I love. I’d like to argue I’m asking just as much of myself as a participant as I am of the artist.

To be open to the artistic experience is so important and everything you encounter will seem boring or meaningless or unimportant unless you allow the artwork to do its work on you. It’s a two way street.

This is a very longwinded way of saying I tried really hard to be open to Gardiner’s style. I dove into this book headfirst, but simply couldn’t make sense of his language. I don’t think I’m not smart enough to have read this book or that I think it should have been written more simplistically. No, not at all. I do think however some more editing would have been useful. I also wonder who exactly he intended to write this book for. Sometimes you can tell who a writer is writing for, and a lot has been said of writers who enjoy listening to themselves speak—or that seem to enjoy listening to themselves. I don’t think Gardiner is that conceded, I think the goal was pure in trying to make Bach’s music accessible to everyone. That is as noble a pursuit as there is in music and writing, at least in my opinion.

Part of me feels like he intended to write this for scholars or teachers. The cynic in me thinks the style is elitist and purposefully difficult. If I allow that part of my brain to convince me its right, I may never enjoy anything so I’m gonna go ahead and tell that part of my brain to very kindly, “Shut the fuck up.” Now, I do think there is something to be said for an author who makes an effort to make their work accessible to readers of all stripes. Not everyone who loves Bach is going to learn something from this book, not everyone who enjoys classical music is going to think Gardiner is a good writer—it’s all subjective. That’s the just the way it goes in art. There’s nothing any of us can do and THAT IS OK.

There are other books on classical music and on Bach that may speak to me. Maybe this is a messenger-not-the-message situation. Who knows. Whatever the case, I’m in the process of getting over whatever guilt I’ve talked myself into feeling. And you know what? There is no reason to feel guilty about not finishing a book. None whatsoever. If you don’t like something, who told you you had to finish it? No one? Ok, so put it down. To not like something is a response. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but not finishing something doesn’t make you a lesser reader or consumer of knowledge than anyone else. There are going to be books you read and fall in love with that other people won’t finish for one reason or another. That’s the beauty of the endeavor. It’s an adventure. Some roads are dead ends, and so you turn around and head back to where you started and then go a different direction.

The only thing that can honestly be expected of you from anyone is that you tried; is that you applied yourself as much as you could; and that you learned something—either about the thing you were trying to learn about or yourself. Ultimately you should learn something about yourself, because that’s the whole point of this anyway: to get to the heart of human experience. As a creative person, all I want to do is make people feel something. I want to convince my reader (that’s you) that the thing I’m telling you is the most honest, authentic, heartfelt expression of an emotion as ever you will find (that’s a riff on something a good friend—a smart and wise friend—told me once, and so I share said wisdom with you).

Did Gardiner, in the 1/5 of his book that I read, convince me much of anything? Honestly, not really, and I’m sad about that. A biography of such renown should have felt unequivocal about its stance, it should not have allowed me to think for myself about the issue of Bach’s life. And yet! And yet, I was unmoved. I was, and I realized no amount of reading or research would ever really change my feeling when listening to the music. This felt like an important realization because it reminds me that the music has just as much to teach me as any book does.

And sometimes your own explorations through a body of work (music, books, paintings, whatever) are the greatest educational experiences you will ever have in your life. So do it your own way. It’s more fun anyway.