When to add another syllable

When to add another syllable

Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Frank Wilson

Recently, my wife and I attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that featured, as the concluding work, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s fifth symphony, which is perhaps best-known — even notorious — for its first movement duel between snare drum and orchestra (a note in the score instructs the drummer to improvise “as if at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra”).

At its premiere in 1922, the symphony was pretty well-received by both critics and the public. But a couple of years later, when performed in Stockholm, about a quarter of the audience is said to have fled the hall. Those who remained in their seats were none too pleased, either. My wife, more than 80 years later, felt their pain.

I, on the other hand, have loved the work since practically the first time I heard it, which was when I was in high school. That’s kind of odd, now that I think about it, because my musical tastes at the time were far from sophisticated. But something about Nielsen’s music grabbed me. I do remember thinking it was the first classical music I had heard and enjoyed that sounded like it belonged to the century I was living in. Sometime during the year I spent between high school and college, I came upon Robert Simpson’s Carl Nielsen: Symphonist and, though I could scarcely grasp the technical stuff, it reinforced my admiration for Nielsen and his music.

Every great composer’s music is clearly and distinctly different from every other’s. That’s one of the things that makes the music great. (It is not the only thing, however, and is not enough in itself to account for such greatness.) Nevertheless, there is something genuinely idiosyncratic about Nielsen’s (the same is true of Leoš Janácek’s). A clue to what distinguishes Nielsen’s music can be found, I think, in something David Fanning says in his article on Nielsen in the latest edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first some background.

Carl August Nielsen (1865-1931) was born on the island of Funen, the third largest of Denmark’s many islands. His father was a house painter and Carl August was the seventh of 12 children. The future composer’s earliest musical experience was playing the fiddle at local dances. So his musical sensibility was grounded in folk music and rustic dance.

Nielsen, in other words, was a hick. He didn’t go to university. His education was catch-as-catch-can. But he was smart and curious, especially about things like art and philosophy — though, as Fanning points out in the aforementioned article, he retained “a highly personal, common man’s point of view on those subjects.” I think it is precisely this that accounts for the unusually individual character of his music.

My own background is sort of the urban counterpart of Nielsen’s. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, both factory workers. I can’t remember ever seeing my grandmother read a book, and my mother read only mysteries. I may have ended up making my living reading books, but I like to think that, like Nielsen, I have retained something of that common man’s point of view.

I have certainly noticed that many people from the working class, if they make it to college, often feel obliged to jettison the notions and attitudes they grew up with, especially the political and religious ones. It is the intellectual equivalent of social climbing. Of course, things aren’t true just because your mom and dad thought they were. But neither are they false just because mom and dad accepted them. Nor are they necessarily true just because Professor So-and-So says they are.

I think of that “common man’s point of view” as a kind of down-to-earth skepticism, an instinctive sense that something ain’t necessarily so just because mom, dad, Father Murphy, or Experts X, Y and Z say it is. Assent to nothing unless you are actually sure what it is you are assenting to. That means you have to come to an understanding of it on your own terms and be able to summarize it accurately in your own words. If you can’t do that, you should remain agnostic on the subject.

And don’t continue to do something a certain way just because that’s the way it’s always been done. Try another way. It may just work. That’s the lesson of Nielsen’s music: It’s traditional all right, but in quite an untraditional way.

In short, as Basho, the great haiku master, advised: If you need another syllable, add another syllable.