Alifetime ago, when I was taking a first-year course in music theory at university, the instructor was banging out a series of chords from a Chopin Nocturne – and I speak literally here, he was punishing the piano as though to beat the sequence into submission, as though to – what? force it to reveal its mysteries? But its mysteries did not lie in an argument about the function of a particular chord, an argument that hinged on whether Chopin had written a G-flat when he should have written an F-sharp (the same black key on the piano).
The Nocturne’s mysteries, insofar as they are discoverable, lie in the relationship between the ceaseless rhythmic iteration of the left hand and the right hand’s striving to sustain its long melody notes, and in the subtle dissonances the left hand uses to corral it – language of affect not wholly different from that used by Henry Purcell in “Dido’s Lament”. None of this seemed of any relevance to my chord-puzzle instructor, and shortly afterwards I changed my course.
If only my teacher had been John Mauceri! Where I deserted, he persevered, switched from piano to conducting, and, with a little luck, found himself assisting Leonard Bernstein, where his real musical education took root. Bernstein knew a thing or two about revealing music’s mysteries, and Mauceri studied well. And not a single sentence of his book requires the kind of technical apparatus acquired in a first-year theory course.
The title is accurate: it really is for the love of music that Mauceri writes. He would no more torture a Chopin Nocturne than he would a dumb animal. The opening pages find him buying a ticket to sit in the balcony of a Carnegie Hall concert featuring music of Mozart and Bruckner. Doing so may sound unexceptional, but professional musicians often have enough music in their lives not to want to attend others’ performances, at least not purely for pleasure. What he wants in the book is to share that pleasure; not just sensuous enjoyment, but avenues of intellectual and philosophical exploration and self-exploration.
He asks the reader to face up to the anomalous nature of western classical music. The concert hall has been described as music’s museum, but unlike an art museum, whose collection ranges over millennia and all the word’s geography, classical music is severely circumscribed.
