Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

It was freezing again, in Berlin. It rained ice. For hours there was just an eerie premonition, an absence of color, then suddenly the sky would fill with wind and a darkening, and ice swarmed out of the darkening, and the wind blew dust and trash and metal and glass at you. The ice swarmed down for ten minutes, twenty at the most, then the calm returned — and the color drained out of the sky. I was listening to a lot of music, twelve-tone music, music of dissonance. I used my father’s headphones, which he’d bought on the flight out, and which he didn’t use for music — they were, in his mind, only for canceling sound. I stopped trying to look like an old rock star who had gone to Berlin to die or recuperate, I simply became that old rock star. I’m sure the headphones made me look ridiculous, but I felt, at the time, that they didn’t make the aged rock star I’d become look ridiculous. I thought they made him look slightly more authentic. I listened to Debussy and Berg and Schoenberg and Webern and Scriabin and Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Boulez and Cage, and the city was like a future city the music had imagined, a city at the end of time, or a city after time. Finally, a city that had not dismissed the dream of this music, but had succumbed to it! I found myself thinking in quotes — quotes about music — I had noted over the years. Adorno had said that new music, by which he meant twelve-tone music, has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world, that all its happiness comes in the perception of misery, all its beauty comes in the rejection of beauty’s illusion. Boulez said, We assert for our part that any musician who has not experienced — we do not say understood, but experienced — the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS . Cage said, I am going toward violence rather than tenderness, hell rather than heaven, ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure, because by doing these things they become transformed, and we become transformed. Stravinsky said, with great despondency, It seems that once the violent has been accepted, the amiable , in turn, is no longer tolerable. Benjamin said that fascist humanity would experience its own annihilation as the supreme aesthetic pleasure. Schoenberg said, I do not compose principles, I compose music.

Our trip around the Rhineland, and around the Ardennes, and up to Brussels, was marked at its beginning by music — the Philharmonic — and marked toward its end by music, or if music isn’t the right word, then the empty trapezoidal box in the glossy white room. In between, in the car, we had listened to a lot of radio. There were pop stations, and there was talk radio we couldn’t understand — in German, French, Dutch, and Luxembourgish. There were classical stations, but we kept catching the shows that played film scores, such as the theme from Superman , or Star Wars , or The Mission . No matter what country we were in, the pop stations played the same pop songs, the classical stations played the same film scores, and the talk radio, though we couldn’t understand most of the words, talked about the same news, or different news but in the same ways. By the end of the trip, I knew all the pop songs. I knew all the words. So did my father. I was beginning to sing the songs in the shower. There were only, at most, ten of them. And when I went out drinking late — sometimes alone and sometimes with my father — we heard the songs, or songs just like them, in the bars or clubs we found. The funny thing is that I liked them then. I wanted to drive as much as possible, so we could hear them. As soon as I started to get sick of one, I seemed to realize that I liked another much more, and I scanned the radio for it, and played it until I got sick of it. I turned them up at my favorite parts. I drove fast when the music was jubilant, I drove slow when the music was thoughtful.

At the Philharmonic, we had seats to the side of the orchestra, overlooking the violinists and the conductor — we sat to the conductor’s right. The double basses were just below us, but out of our sight, unless we leaned forward. There were a few empty seats in the hall, but not many. What a strange and wonderful building it is. It has a pentagon-shaped center, from which rows of seats rise in irregular directions and uneven heights, and the outward flow of this design continues through to the exterior, to the outer structures, which are large, gold, asymmetrical, Expressionist, and which release the acoustic qualities of the interior into the sky. I flipped through the program even though I couldn’t read it. Trish sat between me and my father. It occurred to me we probably looked like a couple, Trish and I. So I tried to take on the demeanor of a man with a pretty and successful and voluptuous and interesting wife, who attends the Philharmonic regularly, and sometimes brings his father. The man beside me, an older gentleman with his wife, sat perfectly still. I looked at him as if to say, You see, I am reading the program in German, and I am attending this concert with my lovely wife and my dear father, but the man, who had silver hair, wore a blue suit, and had blue, bloodshot eyes, only glared at me. I gave the program back to Trish, and she closed it and put it on her lap. The man beside me — how can I possibly describe it — I could almost feel his blood slow down, his thoughts begin to vanish. I decided to try to imitate this stillness. But there were too many distractions. Too many people coughing, clearing throats. Too many people flipping through the programs. Too many strange or attractive people to observe. Then the orchestra took their seats, and there was light applause. Everybody stopped reading programs. Everybody stopped whispering. Nobody coughed anymore. For a moment, it was so silent that it sounded as though we were all falling. Then the conductor appeared, and the applause was slightly louder, but still light. The man beside me clapped a few times, but not enthusiastically. First we heard Debussy’s La Mer . Then Sibelius’s Violin Concerto Number One. I knew them both pretty well. They are both distinctive composers. Debussy is the more respected, probably because he was so clearly an innovator, his music so self-evidently revolutionary and so intelligently about itself . During his lifetime, Sibelius was dismissed and reviled by progressives. You were not to be taken seriously if you listened to Sibelius. But it turned out, as it tends to turn out, historically, that the reason we cannot forget Sibelius is that he was doing something not only new but outrageously radical, it’s just that he was very subtle about it, so nobody noticed. So now he is spoken of among the masters. He has been rehabilitated. Listening to him, and to the Debussy — both pieces are raucous and dynamic — I found myself not only transfixed by the sound of the music but also by the sight of the musicians, and by the hall itself, the audience in its terrifying stillness and restraint. Trish, too, was transfixed — I watched her chest as she breathed through it, and I watched her look upon it. Everything in the room trapped upside down in the dark black drop of her eyes. The lights. The musicians. The embattled, old, wild conductor. A thousand people across from her, quietly breathing. Our applause for both pieces was modest. I made sure I did not begin to clap until after the glaring man beside me clapped, and to stop before he stopped. So I clapped my hands three or four times and put my hands back in my lap. During the intermission, my father asked me, What did you think? Terrific, I said. I happen to know that my father’s damn-with-faint-praise word is terrific . For example — Bob, the book is just terrific, or, Dick, the steaks were absolutely terrific. Completely, one hundred percent, agree, said my father. In the second half, we heard a short Stravinsky piece I thought was woeful, and was of that permanent flaw in the progressive urge, which is infatuation with the clownish, the preposterously bad, merely because it is change, and it happens to be chic — though I admit, absolutely, that the flaw is necessary, and that the same urge is responsible for Stravinsky’s greatness. The final piece was Berg’s Lyric Suite. Which I happen to think is one of the great human achievements, one of the strangest and most unforgettable pieces of music ever written. The music after the intermission was not raucous, and a cloud settled over us all, a reminder to return to the calm confusion of our despondency, or be mindful of it. When it was all over, the audience clapped for a long time without heat or passion. It was sustained, but it was not enthusiastic. A good audience always honors fine music by being disappointed in itself. The orchestra cleared and we stood, and I looked at the glaring man again and gave a manly smile. I had clapped so little. I had barely moved. I had not coughed once, nor cleared my throat. He gave me a manly smile back.