Music From Outside

Mozart: Serenade in B flat, K. 361 ("Gran Partita")

My mom had an uncle whom she was close to, a chemistry professor who loved collecting books and records in his spare time, and who sparked her own lifelong interest in visual arts. He had a huge number of Classical music CDs. At one point, my mother recalls, the collection overflowed the shelves into a stack on the floor of his study that almost reached to the ceiling. One day, the Red Guards ransacked his house and smashed his entire collection. No, he had done most of it himself an hour or so before, in anticipation of what was coming. They finished off the absolutely precious recordings he couldn't bear to destroy himself. There they lay on the wooden floor: shards of grooved plastic that were once vintage recordings of Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.

Forty years later, this scene repeated in the living room of my parents' house in Fremont, California. With a hammer, my father, a former Red Guard, smashed the collection of Classical CD's one by one that I had carefully amassed from the local Tower Records. “I'm going to wean you of this drug once and for all!” My father said as he swung his still muscular arms, honed from manual labor. They were propaganda arms, the arms of the perfect workers and soldiers in those posters he painted in the 60's. I stood by with a cold fire in my heart, the unrepentant counterrevolutionary. As I watched bits of shiny plastic scatter over the carpet, I knew the music would be wedded to my heart forever, and to my hatred of everything productive and modern.

This music was as incompatible with Capitalism as it had been with Communism. I remember the first time I heard it. I was about 12, my father and I were driving to his workplace. I switched on the car radio and some Mozart came on. “Turn that off, will you?” My father said, “That music doesn't belong in the modern world.” How true that was, I thought as soon as I looked out the window. We were in Silicon Valley, a landscape of death, a horror of people working in windowless offices and giant warehouses, surrounded by glowing screens and snaking wires. Mozart was an insult to this world, because he reminded us that some part of us was still human, that some part of us still longed to play, to laugh and cry at the beauty of the world, that we were not completely enslaved.

All modern art and music seemed like propaganda to me: Either Communist propaganda to produce more tractors, or Capitalist propaganda to buy more Viagra. The true message of every song on the radio is “Work, work, work! Buy, buy, buy!” The lyrics don't matter, the message is in the monotonous, unchanging beat, which is the same beat as freeways, factories, fighter jets. It makes us into robots who desperately produce and then desperately consume – and that is the whole story of life. It is in this context that I proudly listen to music written, played and enjoyed by dead white men.