Shostakovich is my Homeboy!

 

I can still remember when Fantasia 2000 came out in theaters.  I practically begged everyone to go see it with me, but to no avail.  Later, when it came out on DVD, I was dazzled by the inventiveness of the use of music and imagery.  It is one great film and I recommend it to anyone who wants to see great imagination on screen.

            I had never lost my love for classical music.  I had listened to it when in middle school primarily as background music for papers.  However, when I listened to Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto, I became a lifelong fan.  Shostakovich combines so many things in his music.  It is orderly and yet feels avant-garde.  It appears very simple to play, and yet I am told his pieces are amongst the hardest.  His life, like his music was filled with contrasts fueled by a sort of pragmatism.

            Living in Communist Russia, one had to always live with such contradictions.  You never were really sure which end of the monster you were going to be on from day to day.  Because of this, and his being Russian, he is widely ignored by most of us in the U.S.[1]  While he has been lambasted by some.  One musical theorist said Shostakovich “made no secret of his debt to Mahler and many other composers: Bach, Stravinsky, jazz and popular music, Jewish and Russian folk music. But was the music of Beethoven not rooted in the music of Mozart and Haydn? Of course it was. But did it not evolve into something entirely different - something that is unmistakably Beethoven? Of course, it did. And who can deny that the symphonies of Shostakovich, taking their starting point from Mahler, developed into an entirely different musical idiom that is unmistakably Shostakovich and nobody else but Shostakovich?”

            And that is the best that can be said of anyone.  There will never be anyone like Dmitri Shostakovich or me or you.  Who knows years later, someone may come across some scrap I have written, like it very much, and put it in a movie, book, story, or what have you.  If you just put things out there, you never can be sure who is listening.

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[1] It also doesn’t hurt that Copland and Gershwin are easier names to pronounce.  Then again, how many of us would actually pronounce Beethoven (ˈbā,tōvən)if we hadn’t had it drilled into our heads by legions of music teachers?