Musical Escapes

Music has the power to take us out of ourselves, to offer a temporary escape to somewhere else. Escape to a distant place or time… to radiance, order, and calm… to fantasy or laughter… or simply to concentrate on something that, for the moment, is all-absorbing. While classically-based, the course will span the gamut—symphony, song, opera, ballet, or musical—with a few surprises thown in from left field. These will be arranged by theme rather than period or genre. Each class will feature one or more longer excerpts or even complete works, together with video clips of all kinds to provide context and get us thinking.

For the course is more than a series of excursions on a musical tour bus or time machine. We will look further into the cliché of being transported by music. Can music convey spiritual radiance without referencing a specific religion? Can it recreate a time other than the one in which it was composed? Can it take us to different places without some clue in the title? Can it make us laugh through sound alone? And since all music plays out in the imagination, can composers use it to explore their fantasies rather than our own? These are important aesthetic questions—the answer is not always yes—but we won't approach them in the abstract; just be prepared to listen, be open to your feelings, and discuss.

I chose the images below for harmony rather than diversity. They only represent a part of what I will play in the actual classes, which I expect to be as varied and entertaining as I can make them. One by one, I will add RESOURCES for each session, at which point the current grey links will be activated and turn gold. rb.

The act of playing takes the musician out of the everyday world and stops the ordinary passage of time. It can have a similar effect on the listener also. Music has long held a place in religious worship, yet even with a non-religious text it can convert a secular space, like the old barn in David Lang's "I want to live where you live," into a sacred one. Music can circumvent our conscious minds and bring us to a sense of order, or radiance, or happiness—or in a dramatic context, anxiety or fear. Music accompanies our make-believe and is a concomitant of fantasy. This introductory class will touch on several subjects that will return later in the course, with numerous examples for discussion as we explore the vast territory.

All music reflects the time in which it was written, so playing or listening to it can be a form of time-travel. But music written to evoke a yet earlier time is a special case. The larger photograph above is a scene from Karelia, a province in the East of Finland, whose storied history is evoked by Jean Sibelius in his Karelia Suite (1893). A decade earlier, fellow Scandinavian Edward Grieg had done something similar with his Holberg Suite, evoking dance forms from the previous century. When Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations in 1899, he was merely depicting a group of friends who used to visit his Worcestershire home. But when Sir Frederick Ashton made it into a ballet in 1968, it became a veritable time-capsule of British social life in the late Victorian era.

Musical landscape painting became a stock-in-trade of later Romantic composers. Besides Sibelius (see previous class), many depicted the lands in which they lived: think of Smetana, Dvorak, and Borodin. Others sent musical dispatches home from other countries: Tchaikovsky from Italy, Rimsky-Korsakov and Chabrier from Spain. Copland presented America in Appalachian Spring, but it was a simpler, idealized America. The two British scenes above also have musical concomitants. When Felix Mendelssohn endured rough seas off the Isle of Staffa in 1829, the resulting Hebrides Overture (Fingal's Cave) described not so much the place as the experience of trying—and failing—to reach it. Gustav Holst's Somerset Rhapsody of 1907 was based upon his collection of traditional folk songs that would be lost when the last generation that knew them passed away. So his portrayal of contemporary England was also a memorial to a life that was quickly slipping into the past.

Listen to any comic-opera overture by Rossini, and you know fun will follow. Buy a ticket for any Broadway show before about 1970, and be prepared to laugh. Music has always been associated with entertainment, whether in vaudeville, opera buffa, operetta, or the occasional ballet; we will sample some of the funniest. But the ability of music to tell a joke is more limited; it requires words, or knowledge of some external context that is ripe for parody, or (for musicians) knowledge of the formal expectations the composer can subvert. We will look at some of these also, for they say much about how music works and what it can—and cannot—do. But does musical humor work for eveyone? Click for to find out.

The link below will open a 3½-minute video which I think is very funny; I hope you do too. Click on it to play, and think about the following questions. Was it funny for you? What made it so? How much of the humor relies upon the acting abilities and technical skills of the four women? How much comes from subverting normal performance expectations? How much depends upon knowledge of specific musical quotations?

Think about your answers to the above questions, then

MY RESPONSE. It can be tedious to explain a joke, but I did ask, so here goes. The question is how much you need to know before you can laugh, or whether this humor is open to everyone.

Everyone, surely, will appreciate the sheer skill of these four women, whether as actresses or musicians. This is a well-rehearsed routine executed to perfection. Most people, surely, will realize that the instruments get played in increasingly bizarre ways. A more subtle point is that chamber music, normally a collaborative endeavor, is here presented as a competition between rivals.

So do you have to know the music? As it happens, I did—the first three references at least: the string players begin with a lick from Vivaldi's Seasons; the pianist responds with the opening of Mozart's "easy" C major Sonata; she then goes into "Mack the Knife" from Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. I did not know if that piece of jazz they all played at the end was also a quotation, but that hardly mattered; it was enough to recognize the style. In fact I suspect that the extreme contrast between styles would be enough, even for those who could not identify any of the pieces.

Music springs from the imagination of the composer and plays out in the imagination of the listener, so it should be an ideal medium for fantasy. Or a fantastic medium for the ideal. From the 18th century on, composers used music to portray idealized visions of the countryside: Vivaldi's Seasons and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony are two examples. Hector Berlioz, one of the first composers to use his own psyche as musical fodder, poured his desires, frustrations, and nightmares into his Fantastic Symphony. Early 20th-century composers Ravel and Janacek brought singing animals onstage in their operas L'enfant et les sortilèges and The Cunning Little Vixen; Ravel also includes singing objects such as the teapot and teacup shown above. And the ne plus ultra of singing animals on the musical stage is surely Cats, Andrew Lloyd Webber's setting of TS Eliot's comic poems for children.

Music has the uncanny power of expressing a yearning for something unknown or even unknowable. The iconic example from the popular media is the song "Somewhere over the rainbow" sung by Judy Garland at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. Or Audrey Hepburn with "Moon River" in Breakfast at Tiffany's. At the other end of the scale is Mahler's valedictory Song of the Earth, whose six movements, all based on motifs from traditional Chinese painting, sing of imagined worlds, both here on earth and beyond the mountains of death.

VANTAGE POINT: TUESDAY MORNINGS, OCTOBER 28 TO DECEMBER 9, 2025

	October 28

Still from a video of "I want to live where you live" by David Lang	RESOURCES

	November 4

A view in Karelia and Ashton's Enigma Variations	RESOURCES

	November 11

Turner's Fingal's Cave and a cottage in Somerset	RESOURCES

	November 18

Scenes from Funny Girl and La fille mal gardée	RESOURCES

	December 2

Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and Lloyd Webber's Cats	RESOURCES

	December 9

The Wizard of Oz and a Chinese landscape	RESOURCES