Idiophone by Amy Fusselman

Author:Amy Fusselman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566895217
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 2018-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

11.

In his essay “Winnicott and Music,” Nicholas Spice writes that children who learn to play music are frequently taught to respect certain master composers. He uses Mozart as an example.

I am going to quote the passage here, but I am going to change Mozart to Tchaikovsky. I am going to put Tchaikovsky in a box so he is safe and protected in a world he never asked to be born into.

Spice writes:

To learn respect for [Tchaikovsky] is to be free to pull [Tchaikovsky] to pieces so as to see how [Tchaikovsky] is made and where [Tchaikovsky] is well made and where less well made. It is to pull and push and stretch and bite [Tchaikovsky], to rail against him and say you are bored by him, to love him and hate him, to test him (if necessary to the limits of destruction), to burlesque him and alter him, to steal from him and make him your own. To learn to respect [Tchaikovsky] is to discover that nothing you do to [Tchaikovsky] will change him. That he survives. It is to treat [Tchaikovsky] as a body of human knowledge and not as a collection of religious texts. To use [Tchaikovsky] as a springboard for something new. To encounter him as one composer to another.

I called up Tchaikovsky and asked him how he wrote the majestic, tree-growing music in The Nutcracker off the words The Christmas tree becomes huge. 48 bars of fantastic music with a grandiose crescendo, and he told me that he didn’t look to the director’s notes to get the job done. He didn’t look to anything outside himself. He stayed in his box, he said. He went into the box of himself and stayed there in the pitch-dark with the door locked. He was free in there, he said, completely and utterly free.

He told me that. And then he hung up on me.

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