Classical Confusion

Evan Sacks-Wilner is a sophomore at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music studying tuba performance. In this interview, Evan discusses classical music and its place in the modern world.

Can you talk a bit about the classical music scene?

The state of classical music is actually on an uprise right now. Everyone says that classical music is dying, classical music is dying. But this generation has started to get back into it. You’ve got two schools of thought really. One—and of course there are in-betweens—but there’s the the lil pump people, and then on the opposite end of the spectrum is us, the classical music people. I call us the pretentious classical music elitists.

That sounds like a fitting name!

Yes. And there are a lot more of us than people realize. The Cincinnati Symphony has been sold out pretty consistently. Meanwhile, there are other orchestras that will only get half of their hall filled up, and you hear all the time about orchestras going on strike because the people higher up don’t realize how much the orchestra, playing at a high level and getting great people, matters to the welfare of society, especially in cities. Orchestras start getting taken for granted. Meanwhile, a lot of the time, the orchestras are the first step of gentrification. Take the New Jersey Symphony. The NJPAC is in Newark. Newark is not the best area, and the New Jersey Symphony plays there, they play at the state theater in New Brunswick, they’ll play in Red Bank which is a little south I believe, and they play at Richardson. That was the first orchestra concert I went to, they were playing Firebird.

Going back to your earlier point that this is the first step of gentrification, isn’t it somewhat problematic that cities are being gentrified? Or are you arguing something else?

I think that as cities go further and further into becoming, I don’t want to say ghettos, but ghettos, like think south side of Chicago. There are murders and thefts that happen in that part of Chicago every night. Meanwhile, in Millennium Park which is somewhere in the middle, that’s where the Chicago symphony plays, and the Chicago Symphony was founded I believe in the early 1900s, and now that part of Chicago is thriving.

So you think that’s a direct result of the orchestra being established there?

I wouldn’t say direct but it definitely brought more, I would say that it helped the city grow into a tourist spot, I guess. Not really a tourist spot, but do you get what I’m trying to say?

Yeah, but it seems like upper level orchestras attract a wealthier crowd because their tickets are so expensive, so then if you establish an orchestra, you’re almost pushing out the lower class. Which is, I dunno lowering crime rates is good but crime isn’t intrinsically tied to any one class and it’s not good to push out entire people who can no longer afford to live where they’ve always lived because of gentrification. Because of the influx of wealthier people.

Ah. Well, orchestras are starting to have cheaper tickets for nosebleed sections. They’ll make most of their money off of donors. Student tickets for the Cincinnati Symphony are fifteen bucks. Another thing that students can do is, at the beginning of the year I paid 50$ and now I can get tickets for any concert this season.

What do you think orchestras bring as far as enriching the lives of people who listen? Do you think orchestral music generates more empathy or creativity? I know there are studies that say, if have your child listen to orchestral music, they’ll grow up to be a genius. What’s your take on all that sort of positivity toward classical music?

I mean obviously I think it’s good because I want a job. But anyway, I’m gonna answer this kind of in a circular way. I find that, take the military for instance. The military is the largest job provider for musicians, and you take the President’s Own, you take the Army Band, and they will travel to play for troops, and they’ll play for the community. Military concerts are completely free. If you go see a military band, it’s going to be for free. It’s what they do, and since they’re funded by the military budget they’re jobs are for the most part safe. And so they exist to lift spirits of people. Orchestras, I would say, do the same thing, but they also provide an educational aspect. They have outreaches, they’ll have little chamber music things where they’ll send a group of musicians to a high school or a middle school, and play things for them. I remember when I was in fourth grade a group of percussionists from I believe the Princeton Symphony came and did a demonstration of all the different percussion instruments. A brass quintet, when I was in sixth grade, played everything from the Simpsons, and they just explained what their instruments do. Kind of like what we did with the Kid Connection kids when they came to the high school. And they have these things called “Young People’s Concerts” or “Kiddie Concerts.” I got to play in one as a side by side with the New Jersey Symphony my Sophomore year of high school, when I first started taking lessons from Derek who is the principal tuba there. But you take a child to those concerts and you’ll raise them to love classical music, and it’ll help that era. It’s not just the music, it’s also the culture and the style. This music is 200 something odd years old, 300 years old. Think of, I dunno, the Beatles. In a couple years, they’ll probably still be around. Queen will probably still be around. Orchestras are just cover bands, tribute bands.

That’s true, I’ve never thought of it like that.

Yeah. You see this guy with a bunch of people behind him get up on stage in a white tank top and a mustache, you’re gonna know he’s impersonating Freddie Mercury. You see orchestral musicians come up in tuxes and such and most of what they play is historically accurate because that’s what the composer wrote down. So that’s essentially what we’re doing, is we’re just a cover band.

But with far reaching impacts? As you were saying with working with children, and bringing joy and happiness to the listeners?

Well think of this. When you’re listening to, do you listen to classical music?

New World Symphony!

When you listen to New World Symphony, take the second movement, the Largo, the English Horn solo.

Mhm beautiful.

Exactly! You’re smiling right now, just thinking about it.

Although you could argue that all music does that, not just classical.

Lil Pump?

Okay well you could argue that a good portion of music beyond classical does that.

Yeah, that’s true.

So do you think that classical is just the pinnacle, the best at making you happy?

We’re the OGs. But there still is new music that gets performed. Like think John Cage, even the music of John Williams gets performed by orchestras.

But don’t you think it’s harder for that new music to gain traction because of how popular Mozart and those big classical composers are, especially in comparison to the modern people who are trying to work up to that?

Of course.

So they don’t you think we’re always going to be stuck in this rut of the old classical music, and don’t you think we’ll eventually get bored with that?

Not if the newer music does manage to gain traction. But in order to do that you need to have newer music that will make you feel the same emotions that Mozart and Mahler and Bruckner make you feel. It’s all mood music, really. Nowadays, music is like (*bangs random notes on piano*).

I mean not all of it.

But there’s a good difference between that and classical.

Couldn’t you argue that there are definitely modern musicians who work more towards gaining popularity than creating music that’s beautiful, but on the flip side there are musicians who aren’t targeting classical symphony orchestras but are still making music that is at least attempting to be beautiful? Sia comes to mind because her music is written from the heart, it’s stuff that sounds pretty, and it’s stuff that some people can seriously relate to.

Well in a perfect world the ones that make music that comes from the heart should be the ones that are successful.

The Emo Scene—No mom, I’m not obsessed with the internet.

Being in middle school was weird. You were too old to be considered cute and innocent by adults, but too young to be given the respect and freedoms that come with adulthood. You were encouraged to express yourself and pursue your passions, but the unforgiving environment of middle school constantly tried to push you into the mold of conformity. Your body was beginning to change and grow with the progression of puberty, but—actually, lets not go there. Anyway, given how turbulent of a time middle school was, preteens from the early 2000s frequently turned to emo music, hoping to find some lyrics to express their inner angst. Of course though, with no money or means of transportation, teenagers began to explore the growing frontier that they were becoming increasingly familiar with: the internet.

Emotional hardcore music, or “emo” for short, has a history that begins long before the internet became mainstream. This genre has roots in the United Kingdom with the loud and brash punk music from groups like Black Flag, The Dead Kennedys, and Hüsker Dü, before this music style extended across the pond to D.C. in the mid-80s and the hardcore punk scene was on the rise, led by groups including Rites of Spring and Embrace in the Revolution Summer of 1985. Alt rock and indie groups in the Midwest then twisted this genre into something more cathartic and mainstream, and finally at the turn of the century, these bands began to adopt a pop-based sound and write more emotional, angst-filled lyrics, prompting the emo genre to take off. In conjunction with this, the invention of social media platforms including Myspace and Facebook, and music streaming sites like Youtube, Pandora, Spotify, created conditions for the perfect online emo music storm.

The online emo music scene allowed listeners to enjoy and rave about this genre from the comfort of their own homes, sometimes even interacting with the revered musicians themselves via social media platforms, prompting an entire online subculture to evolve from this music scene. A simple search of the term “emo” on Tumblr yields thousands of results, with blogs like The Aging Scene Kid and Washed Up Emo among the top results, and music streaming sites all offer a plethora of emo music playlists and albums. And even though the majority of fans were teenagers, spread throughout the world and interacting only through instant messenger, these listeners managed to adapt their own singular look, complete with thick eyeliner, skinny jeans, and black band tees. Remarkably too, this music scene paid little mind to the gender of listeners, perhaps because of the anonymity granted to internet users. This anonymity also allowed listeners portray themselves however they wish, and actually shape the very music scene that they were a part of.

As with many subcultures, the emo music scene died as it slipped into the mainstream. Most relics of emo music today are jabs at this overdramatic genre, including a spoof song of President Trump’s tweets as lyrics to an emo song and a plethora of “cringe compilations.” Nonetheless, this online scene was revolutionary in how it used the internet to connect people from all over the world, granting otherwise misunderstood teenagers a place to express their ideas and bond with one another over a shared love of music.

No, Ryan Gosling, jazz is not dying

“I never thought jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic” -Miles Davis

Like Mia from the hit movie La La Land, I hated jazz. The whiny melodies, the seemingly endless improv sessions in the middle of a standard, the sloppy syncopation of swung lines—it just didn’t make sense. Why would anyone care to listen to jazz, let alone devote their whole lives to this slapdash music style? Needless to say, I was less than excited to learn that I would be joining my sister at some obscure jazz club in New York City to listen to some random jazz group on one of my last days of freedom before college. On the plus side, the club served food. I was pleasantly surprised to walk into what appeared to be a restaurant, already aglow with the murmur of conversations around me, as I sat down at a table adjacent to an empty stage. A tarnished saxophone sat on stage just out of arm’s reach, seeming to cooly asses the audience from its position behind a mic stand. As I carefully sipped the bowl of piping-hot gumbo in front of me, I steeled myself for what I believed was going to be one of the most banal concerts of all time. Boy was I wrong.

The band filtered out: a large saxophone player who picked up his instrument with the tenderness of a mother picking up her first-born child, a suave pianist, a shrimpy-looking drummer who was dwarfed by the bass drum, a dorky trombonist, a lanky bass player who sauntered out to a stool before absentmindedly caressing his instrument as though it was his long lost love, and finally a trumpet player, strutting out to center stage. Following only the briefest of introductions, a crash of noise, and the first chart had begun, a song that I had no hope of recognizing. The drummer nodded along to his rhythm, eyes glued to the trumpet player, who punctuated the sentences of the trombonist, who provided the countermelody to the saxophonist, who transformed the tarnished piece of metal sitting alone onstage moments ago into a living being. The saxophone was no longer an instrument, but instead an extension of the man, a living being, caught up in the fabric of the music and adding its own intricate embroidery to the texture. Without any warning, the sax dropped out and the trombonist was now steering the song. All eyes were now on him as the band members spoke to each other in a language I couldn’t understand, with music instead of words and head nods for punctuation. The music crescendoed, increasing in passion and strength until it felt as though the noise would shatter the walls of the room, too ripe with emotion to be contained by mere sheetrock. Then without warning, silence. An ephemeral stillness, followed by the explosion of applause.

One of their later charts, a ballad, nearly brought me to tears. The trumpet player switched to a flugelhorn, before diving into the honey-thick noise created by the saxophone and drum set, outlined by the occasional hiss of the cymbal. He sang through the flugel, a cross between the pure hymn of an angel and the anguished wail of a lost lover, with eyes squeezed shut, body slowly swaying to his own song as it rose in both energy and tempo. Each note hung in the air like embers from a fire, glowing as they floated up to the stars, until the song ended on one final cry behind the sizzle of the cymbals. The remaining songs followed this precedent of spontaneous creation and communication, producing an experience that was both practiced to perfection, and constantly new and changing.

Throughout the entirety of the jazz concert, there was always a conversation between the musicians, a sort of cycle of improvisation and creativity, passed around from person to person. The jazz wasn’t just music. It was a living, breathing force, an entranced being conjured up from the people on stage, and their lumps of noise-making twisted metal and wood. It was alive. And, in spite of what Sebastian from La La Land may believe, something as alive and jazz can never truly die.

More Than Just Pop: The Script

“The beauty of their lives
Is when they’re dead and gone
The world still sings along
When anything went right
When anything went wrong
They put it in a song”

-Danny O’Donoghue

The Script is changing the script of pop music (excuse the pun). In their eponymous debut album, The Script, the Irish trio proves that they are much more than just another boy-band. Embedded in each and every one of their songs is a carefully scripted story written to resonate with an audience beyond just your run-of-the-mill pop-obsessed teenagers, touching on topics as basic as heartbreak, to as nuanced as the inequity in today’s social climate. This exquisite storytelling, combined with the group’s inventive sprinkling of rock and R&B influences in their songs, all polished to perfection, explains how the album The Script has won the test of time over this past decade.

While The Script was only propelled to stardom in 2008, the band’s lead vocalist Danny O’Donoghue and guitarist Mark Sheehan have a rich musical history together, and even knew each other since childhood. The two previously performed in an Irish-based group called Mytown, but failed to gain international acclaim and soon disbanded. Following this, the duo traveled to Los Angeles where they worked alongside producers and performers alike, before recruiting drummer Glen Power and, following a series of jamming sessions, founded their own band. The group’s first album, The Script, debuted shortly thereafter.

the script

The album opens with the single “We Cry,” a carefully crafted ballad with soaring vocals and ghostly coos, combined with a rock-esque taste added by the guitar, all on top of the background heartbeat of the drum kit. Interspersed between the smooth cries of the melody, O’Donoghue, in an almost spoken-word style, tells the hard-knock stories of a young mother, a drug-addicted musician, and an aspiring female politician. He breaks through the pop-music tide of hollow love-sick and bubbly lyrics, instead tackling heavier topics ranging from drug abuse, to sexism, to inequity, singing, “I’m sick of looking for those heroes in the sky to teach us how to fly.” The raw truth emanating from the lyrics in “We Cry,” juxtaposed with the smooth and polished notes of the music, packs a powerful punch for the Script’s opening track.

“Before the Worst” returns us to the sounds of a more classic pop song, complete with a steady backbeat of drums and guitar, and an almost desperate banging of the keyboard. The intimate rawness of the lyrics, reflecting on “a time when we stayed up all night, best friends, yeah, talking til the daylight” is perhaps what makes it such a universally understood and widely received piece. In an interview, Sheehan explained that fans would come up to him and tell stories about what this song means to them and how they relate to the lyrics, proving just how large the fanbase is that “Before the Worst” resonates with.

The following tracks likewise detail romantic pitfalls, providing stories that are simultaneously detailed and personalized, while also accessible enough for a wide audience to relate to the lyrics. Things are then shaken up with the song “Rusty Halo,” marked by a more rock-based beat. The fast-paced tempo of this track automatically induces a sort of anxiety in the listener, yet ironically, this song also introduces subtle religious overtones, suggesting a sort of upcoming final judgement day in the lyrics, for which O’Donoghue has to “Shine my rusty halo.” While not appealing to a specific narrative, this track touches more generally on the likewise universal idea of guilt.

Towards the end of the album, The Script briefly diverges from their classic storytelling style for a gag song, “If You See Kay” (spelling out F-U-C-K). The origin of this song actually directly involves the members of The Script and their audience alike, in which O’Donoghue posted the opening lyrics to “If You See Kay” online, and then let listeners comment on and tweak the song however they like from there.

The album ends with the softest ballad yet, “I’m Yours,” complete with the steady backbeat of an acoustic guitar, and soothing coos from O’Donoghue himself. Although a more standard sappy love song, this provides listeners with an opportunity to recuperate after unpacking emotional baggage from the earlier tracks. That’s not to say, though, that “I’m Yours” lacks musical value. The guitar bridge before the last refrain has an almost Spanish guitar-vibe to it, and the swells of the music throughout the track create a warm and relaxed feeling to the piece, a welcome change from the rougher rock-based earlier tracks. And of course, given that this song is so lovey-dovey, virtually anyone in a relationship can relate to the piece both on its surface level, and more deeply upon analysis of the lyrics.

Concertt

Although some critics claim that The Script is somehow too polished, these people are ironically overlooking the very thing that makes The Script’s first album so timeless: its attention to detail. More specifically, it’s attention to the intimate details of life, love, pain, and joy in the narratives of their songs. Ten years after its debut, The Script is still widely played on a variety of music stations and channels not because of the notes that the band wrote on the page, but instead as a result of everything the band created that goes beyond the written music, from their interactions with fans and listeners, to the ageless stories they tell with their songs. The Script’s uncanny ability to connect with each and every one of their audience members is thus what makes their first track rise above the level of mere noise, instead being transformed into a powerful and timeless force in itself.