Road On Fire

Before orchestra musicians get up on stage to play those massive masterworks, they grocery shop and pick up their kids from daycare just like the rest of us. When life breaks from the hum-drum and things get really intense, however, they have a distinctly appropriate mental playlist on hand.

We have all been to the panel discussions and/or read the articles lamenting that the symphony just isn’t as cool/sexy as other genres, but it seems that as a society we still cleave to the collective action of many classical musicians to carry us through periods of extreme turbulence. Would the helicopter ride of Apocalypse Now been as terrifying or the devastation in Platoon been as heartbreaking without its “classical music” scoring? Rather than making the genre artificially starlet hot or Dancing With the Stars fun–at least those are the ad campaigns I usually see when they’re doing anything out of the ordinary–why do we never address the grand gestures such music often addresses as it relates to contemporary life? There probably are examples of this in action, but I have missed the
memo. Can anyone pull something out of the subscription mailing pile
for us and illustrate?

One man with a piano might be able to poignantly hold our hand through the death of one
princess, but maybe it takes more than one musician and some hefty repertoire to help a nation
confront the larger-than-life issues on the table at the start of the 21st century. If it was assumed that Americans were too safe in their bubble-lives for that message to resonate, well, I think enough people have been slapped out of that daydream for some new lines of communication to open up right about now.