19. Symphonies

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Something happens in a really good orchestral concert, akin to but distinct from the tidal magic of any stage play or basketball game or arena show building to its climax. Symphonies—just one of the musical formats an orchestra plays, but the most awesome—usually have four separate movements, or chapters, written in the same key and drawing on related musical ideas. Within this structure is wide variation, but pretty often the first movement is charismatic and sparkling and then the second and maybe third movements drift and wander and ruminate. And now you’re 30 or 40 minutes into the piece and the fourth movement comes around—this is usually after a brief pause for the musicians to gather themselves and the audience to cough (a lot) and steady up for the change of mood—and it’s got a pulse again, a tension and slightly boasting finitude; and the audience, which is made up of old, intermittently sleeping white people, begins not to stir exactly but to brace, as if the hall is being roused not person by person but limb by limb, a ligament at a time. You can see it in the attention, too, of the performers, the intensity of their gaze at the sheet music and the swiftness of their page-turning and in their athletic tautness, which is characterized like any game-winning posture by its lack of distraction or complication, its purity.

A stage awaiting the Prague Symphony Orchestra, at a concert that changed my life.

In the last minute or two of such a performance the applause has already begun; it’s just suspended, like a TV show that you pause the second it appears onscreen so you can go get a bowl of cereal. The players burst toward their finish and thunder a few final chords and there’s an unspoken agreement with the audience about the exact moment when the applause will become audible and it does like an explosion. If you’re in Europe the applause goes on for 20 minutes and bruises your hands; if you’re in America, half the audience is milling toward the elevator, trying to remember where they parked. But the other half is clapping.

I say this kind of ending is distinct from in most other performance because of the number of individual players, which for a symphony is usually at least dozens, who must coordinate their movements in lockstep with people they can’t see or hear across the stage (hence the conductor). For my college thesis I wrote about what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness, which is something like: How and why do we experience being conscious? You could do all this cognitive processing in automatons with the lights off inside, it seems, and yet here we are watching (and hearing and smelling) the movie of life play out across our internal screens. David Chalmers is the academic who has best articulated this problem (against the denials of his rival Daniel Dennett that the problem is even a problem) and in The Conscious Mind he discusses the possibility that any system of cause and effect that is complex enough—your cat, your computer, a billion people on walkie-talkies—will give rise to some level and type of consciousness. It’s always struck me that in a fusion, on one stage, of 50 or 70 or 200 musical performances, each a whole human’s recipe of mathematics and emotion, all hitting the ears and the hearts of a couple of thousand audience members at once, a lot of complex causality is happening. We wouldn’t know about it, any more than one of my neurons knows about me, but by my standards it’s not crazy to think that the symphony—particularly in that enrapturing finale—might briefly take on a very literal kind of life. Imagine.

I’m writing about this here because I don’t think it’s coincidental that symphonies, antique apex predator in the creative ecosystem, are potent motivators for a runner, and because I wish they were a more widely treasured part of humanity’s endowment to us. The cultural sins of the classical music establishment are obvious, in my opinion, and would be worthy of dooming it were the work itself not so precious. If you decide to listen to a symphony after reading this, I recommend Sibelius’s Fifth, Beethoven’s Seventh, Mahler’s Second and Tenth (which is unfinished), and Bruckner’s Seventh. (I’m partial to drama, and these are barn-burners.) But absolutely do not listen to the first recording that comes up on Spotify; do some light Googling to find the best one. (This is really important; one recording is no more the equal of another than the gutter is a beach.) Listen to it on headphones or in your car, start to finish, with your phone out of reach. Better yet, come with me to a concert. The music is alive, and it does its work best in person.

Coming Tuesday: Pain.

This recording of the never completed Mahler 10 will take you on a journey in 25 minutes.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.