As we begin the fourth year of this venture, we note with pleasure that our group of writers included eminent musicologists from the outset, and that they continue to provide such elucidating copy. This base has been augmented by numerous proficient musicologists and other music professionals, including performers—who run the gamut from retirees from eminent careers and established concert artists to those embarking on a life within the classical-music world.

The sheer volume of content is in itself cause for satisfaction as well — 1,200 reviews and 4,000 concerts listed in three years. The public forum in January 2009, and the 13 subsequent articles on the transformation of WGBH and WCRB garnered not only hundreds of comments, but seem to have induced the WGBH Foundation’s administration and the stations’ personnel to listen and adopt many of the suggestions of our writers and readers. In their interviews, our writers’ integrity and their reluctance to accept boilerplate responses from their subjects are truly admirable. This is brave and effective journalism.

BMInt has maintained an enviable record for reviewing performances by some of the smaller organizations, whose concerts tend to escape the notice of the major newspapers. This, in my view, provides a major contribution to the cultural scene, both by enriching the historic record and by raising the visibility of talented and deserving performers. Inevitably, some of our reviewers have sung hymns of praise, whereas others have found fault with details of what they have heard. It is heartening that for the most part they have avoided both the treacle of uncritical enthusiasm and the venom of personal prejudice.

The prevailing level of scholarship has been and is high. We are proud of the distinguished PhDs who write for BMInt and the intellectual level of their evaluations. In turn we accord them a well-read forum for views on subjects and aspects of the arts that their normal professional publications might not engender.

This is surely why concert presenters increasingly quote from our reviews in their publications and place our ads in their program books as a courtesy. It undoubtedly explains why Lloyd Schwartz, classical music critic of The Boston Phoenix, called us one of the 10 best events for classical music in Boston in 2010.

What lies ahead? For one thing, it is clear that we should expand the number and frequency of articles on upcoming performances, as well as on various subjects of musical interest. To this end, we solicit and welcome pre-qualified submissions from readers.

So far, we have worked on a shoestring. The generous $3,000 annual grant from Harvard Musical Association, used only for ancillary expenses, constitutes our entire income. Everyone involved with the endeavor is a volunteer, which makes our survival possible, at least for now. Almost every presenter provides two tickets to the reviewer per concert, which provides a viable basis for our operations. Neither the publisher nor executive editor receives any compensation. A vibrant future will depend on our finding a more sustainable model. We welcome suggestions from those skilled in financial matters on how the Intelligencer can be supported while remaining independent.

I close with the BMInt mantra: “If you hear something, write something.”

When BMInt began this website in the fall of  2008, we interviewed our editor, Harvard Professor Robert Levin. During the session he spoke eloquently on Mozart — his passion and expertise. In this continuation of that interview we deliberately maintain Professor Levin’s distinctive conversational style.

Mozart uses a lot of task-oriented material — like no other classical music composer. But he does it in a completely functional sort of way. I don’t understand how this happens, but when he was seven or eight years old, when he’s setting a text for an aria, he already uses the procedure of taking one pair of lines and uses it for this musical purpose and takes another for another musical purpose, so the architecture—the hierarchy of the composition—corroborates the narrative of the text. Now you’d think, well, there ought to be a lot of people who do that. No, most people just go through the text, and then they repeat the text. They do all the four lines or the six lines or the eight lines.

What Mozart is doing is to tell us, “We’ll use this to tell you where we are. This is the key of D major. Now I’m going to use this second strophe to get to A major. Now I’m going to use this third one to get back to the principal key.” And all of a sudden, what the music is doing, and what the text is doing, are reinforcing one another. So in a typical piece of music, why is he using ten themes? Because one theme is, say, “Hi, my name is Bob Levin, and I come from New Brunswick, New Jersey. And the next theme is, “How ’bout we go out and have a beer?” And then the next theme is, “Well, while we’re having a beer, why don’t we order something?” And the next theme is, “Are you happy to be here?” And the next theme is, “Y’know, let’s go out dancing.”

Each one of those tunes then becomes associated with a certain level of energy. They’re either definitional, or they’re driving somewhere, or they’re consolidating, or they’re winding down. The audience doesn’t need to be aware of these things, but subliminally they are, because the character of every one of the themes is different. One of them is more lyrical, one of them is a bit more hyped up. Another one may have a march or some other replication of some sociological gesture that people recognize and that they can associate with, such as, sighing upon appoggiaturas, and so forth. And so in the piece, Mozart then deploys this series of dizzyingly varied gestures; and one that occurs at a certain point will then reoccur at analogous places in the piece, but not in certain other ones.

Mozart controls this hierarchy in a way that no other composer of classical music that I’ve ever encountered does. He’s using more material, but it is more task- and specifically affect- and character-oriented, and as a result, it seems so obvious and so simple that nobody even notices how rich it is. But, of course, the Emperor Joseph II did notice; he said there were too many notes. In that sense, the Emperor was right. It was a kind of overdose, it was almost too much. He said, “Very good my dear Mozart, but too many notes.” And Mozart said, “Not one more than was absolutely necessary,” — which was not a very good way to win friends and influence people. The point that I’m making is that Mozart succeeds in making the assimilation of complex material and the comprehension of its coherence remarkably natural and easy.  This is the crux of the so-called Mozart effect.

Music that is so purpose-oriented creates the local and large scale architecture.  It defines how you introduce yourself as a character within the musical drama; it defines how you then proceed to go someplace; it defines how you feel when you’re arriving; it defines your sense of expectation; it defines how you’re going to relax a little bit; it defines how you’re going to head, in musical terms, to a final conclusion because you’ve got a soloist who’s going to do some fancy stuff after you have prepared her/his entry, and then there’s a fanfare that says “Let’s bring on the main show.” You can hear these things happen in the first movement of a Mozart concerto, and because they all sound different, even if they use a kernel of the same idea, they’re costumed in such a way that each one of them has a very specific character. They’re specifically dramatic and narrative in their tone, and therefore, people who don’t pay attention to them still figure out what they’re doing, because they figure it out from their intrinsic character. Being able to juggle easily a dizzying plethora of ideas obviously makes listeners smarter — much smarter than listening to a piece that doesn’t do much of anything except just go on and on, doing one thing after another, which might have a variety of tunes, but a variety of tunes that has no particular character orientation or purpose.

There are plenty of French composers contemporary to Mozart, like Bréval, who wrote lots and lots of tunes within a single movement, but they’re all relatively interchangeable in terms of their character; they’re very, very inventive in a certain sense, but they don’t elucidate the structure, and therefore they’re not delineators. And if they’re not delineators, after twenty minutes, you lose your orientation:  “Mommy, are we there yet?!” A piece of music needs to tell people that.

That’s the reason that contemporary music became tough when composers tossed tonality out the window… I tell students, “You know, you hear a succession of major sevenths, these dissonant sort of sounds, Bing Bang Bong, and within several seconds it’s like you just entered the 11-mile-long St. Gotthard tunnel. The last daylight fades in back of you and you think, “Now, how long is this piece going to last?”

If a person is in the middle of the tunnel and has no idea how long it’s going to be until the light at the end, he/she will go stir crazy! They either turn off or they become desperate. As I say to people, if you think the analogy of being in the middle of the Gotthard tunnel is a little bit too crazy, think about being claustrophobic, suddenly realizing that you’re miles under the top of the Alps, there, and think of what happens when all of a sudden there’s a traffic jam and you stop. You’re at least five miles from either portal of the tunnel and you’re sitting there. And now you’ve been there for an hour and a half. Some otherwise sane people might just lose it. People don’t necessarily go that crazy when listening to a piece of post-Webern serial music, but some people do.

People tend to want to know how many more minutes a piece will last. But without an intuitive grasp of atonal musical syntax, how can the lay listener tell? Frequently, when we hear a new piece, the performer will apologize and say, “This is only an eight-minute piece!” At least you know that the journey has an end. I am not criticizing music of the last century; I’m a passionate advocate of new music and commission and perform new works regularly.  But if I wish to succeed at communicating their content, I have to understand the mindset of my listeners.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: On listening to demanding music

A few numbers may serve to illustrate my points:

Mr. Eiseman tells me that our hit rate has grown from the low hundreds each day last October to over 4,700 per day at present. Total accumulated hits now amount to over 700,000. More than 30 regular contributors have produced 250 articles and reviews. Google has indexed over 800 links to our pages. BMInt’s calendar has become the most complete in the greater Boston area. And a number of music organizations’ 2009-2010 season brochures featured quotes from our articles.

Nor is it merely about numbers. It is also about the quality of the writing. Almost all writers are musicologists and/or composers. I need not count the number of advanced degrees held by our volunteer staff, nor would I wish to speculate about how many scholarly articles they have previously published in their fields of expertise. I shall hope not to engage in hubris by asserting that BMInt is on track to becoming what we hoped for — a modern version of Dwight’s Journal of Music for the computer age.

The other aspect of our success is the participation of the groups whose concerts we list and review — and many of them would not have reviews at all were it not for our modest undertaking. Most Boston-area presenters from the large commercial types to the smaller-scale specialists have been on board as well. Not only have they linked to BMInt reviews and articles, they have in many cases collaborated by placing small advertisements for our site in their program books. Many music organizations, prominent to small, are now asking us to send reviewers.

My final words to our readers: “If you hear something, write something.” Offer your blog opinions at the bottom of the Intelligencer’s posts, or if you have more to say, send us your reviews and articles for consideration. Our email is info@classical-scene.org.

Robert D. Levin is Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. A world-wide acclaimed classical performer, composer, and musicologist, he has completed and reconstructed a number of classical works, especially unfinished compositions by Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach. Prof. Levin is also Artistic Director of the Sarasota Music Festival.

Lee Eiseman, program chair of Harvard Musical Association, conceived of this publication, The Boston Musical Intelligencer, as the reincarnation of Dwight’s Musical Journal, published by John Sullivan Dwight with the support of HMA for 35 years -from 1852 until 1881.

Robert D. Levin, a world-wide acclaimed classical performer, composer, and musicologist, is Dwight P. Robinson Professor of Humanities in the Music Department of Harvard University. At a recent meeting with Eiseman, executive editor Bettina A. Norton, and musicologist and composer Mark DeVoto, Levin commented on the role of the Intelligencer.

When I once visited a high school in Laguna Beach to talk about music education, I met a Chinese gentleman, a Mr. Chang I think was his name, and he ran a band program at the school. But they had abolished the string program!

Eiseman: Well, the bands are for marching with the football team.

Levin: Of course. So, they had abolished the string program, and I got up there in front of everybody and I said, “The string program is the soul of the place. The brass players who play in the band love to play in the band, but, BOY! do they love to play Wagner – and they love to play these big romantic symphonies, the Dvorak symphonies, and Tchaikovsky, and stuff like that. If you really want to see fire in their eyes, that’s what you gotta have, but you can’t do that without wind players and especially string players… this is the essence of the whole thing.”  I left the next morning and went up to Northern California to address another school.  Then I flew home, and about three days later, I got a call from the superintendent. He said, “You know something? The next morning, a couple came in to my office and gave me a check for $10,000 for a string program.”  There is a saying that all politics are local. It made me think that maybe it would be more important to go around to these high schools than to play with the great orchestras of the world.

When I was in high school I played in the band…. Anyway, these things can be done. I believe the educators want to do this. The problem is they do not have funding for anything.

Eiseman: In that sense, it’s a luxury, because it happens only if a private donor comes in and offers to pay for it.

Levin: That’s what has happens in our free enterprise non-regulated system gone mad. People are starting to talk about the fact that the American infrastructure is going to hell. You go to China and everything is new. You go to East Germany, whose infrastructure was neglected under Communism and but totally rebuilt after reunification, with gleaming highways and high-speed rail and a brand new telecommunications system, whereas the overpass at Sullivan Square was torn down because it had rusted to pieces, and a bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. And we’ve got the still-unaddressed consequences of Katrina.

Eiseman: We need to lose a war to China and have a reverse Marshall Plan.

Levin: I’ll tell you something. My uncle, Benjamin Spieler-may he rest in peace -died at the age of 90 in July.  He studied with Simeon Bellison of the New York Philharmonic, the clarinetist pal of Prokofiev.  Bellison had a chamber ensemble in New York and commissioned Prokofiev to write the Overture on Hebrew Themes.  Bellison taught Leon Russianoff, who created a dynasty of clarinet players, and my uncle.

In the war my uncle was drafted. He was a medic and became the first clarinetist of the GI Symphony, In the first year the Fulbright scholarships were given, he got one and went to Paris and studied at the Conservatoire, and got diplomas in flute, oboe, and chamber music, playing clarinet – one of the very few people who got diplomas in three instruments. He later learned the saxophone and the bassoon. So he was a polymath. He came home in ’52, found out I had perfect pitch, and threw the book at me. Solfège, what else? He found me teachers and paid for them, and when my solfège teacher said the only way for me to make huge progress was to go and work with Nadia Boulanger, he paid the bill and he went over and chaperoned me! I was 12 at the time.  He paid for five summers at Fontainebleau and a year in Paris, and then he paid for the amount of my Harvard education not covered by financial aid. He was truly my musical guardian angel.

There is a Boulanger exhibit which is being mounted upstairs outside of the Isham Library[1] right now.  As you know, Nadia Boulanger had a strong connection to Harvard; she taught at Radcliffe during the Second World War and returned to Harvard on occasion thereafter.  Given this relationship, she decided to will the scores of all of her American students to Harvard.  Upon her death the executrix of her estate, Annette Dieudonné,[2] supervised the shipment of that vast trove to Harvard.  Apparently it was the only thing regarding the disposal of her collection that Boulanger communicated to Dieudonné before she died. Dieudonné sent the valuable French manuscripts to the Bibliothèque Nationale, and Boulanger’s practical scores went to Lyons Conservatoire, with which she had no connection whatsoever, but it was the second new national school, and so Annette Dieudonné probably thought, why not give them some books? But the decision was made to send everything – you know, from Copland through Rorem to her last students in the 1970s, including both work that had been done under her aegis, and compositions that had been sent to her by these composers.  And Harvard has catalogued these thousands of manuscripts.

A few days ago, Sarah Adams, one of the Music Department’s crack librarians, sent me an email from Isham. They discovered a sheaf of my compositions and they wanted to put something into the exhibit.  That would be fairly embarrassing, considering that my materials were all juvenilia.  Why am I telling you this story? The piece Sarah wanted to put on display was a song called “The Phantom of Fontainebleau Palace,” which I composed 48 years ago!  In fact, the story was that Nadia Boulanger asked me to write a song. She asked me to write a song. There I was, in France, and I had no access to W.B. Yeats, Vachel Lindsay, or William Carlos Williams, or anything else. But my uncle, who was my chaperone, said, “You know, how about doing something of local interest? So he wrote a poem about the ghost of one of France’s sovereign-say, Louis XV, or Napoleon-the spirit at midnight, roaming about the palace, ‘Who are all these interlopers in my ancestral home?’  And so on and so forth.  He wrote this poem! My uncle never wrote poems!

So I wrote this song, and there it is: “Music by Bob Levin, words by Uncle

Ben.” This is going to be shown, to my mortification, in one of the display cases.  Now, to come back to this whole question: The matter of education is very clear. Young people want to learn musical instruments. You put a clarinet in the hands of eight-year-olds and they’re gung-ho. I mean they really are. All of them. Whether they think they like rock music or classical music, you can do those things.

When I was a kid growing up, Samuel Chotzinoff was the Music Director of NBC.  He created the NBC Symphony Orchestra for Toscanini. You could watch Mozart’s Così fan tutte on NBC TV. Network television in the 1950s and early ’60s -

Eiseman: They were commissioning operas then.

Levin: That’s correct. They were doing such things. That’s how Giancarlo Menotti’s Christmas perennial Amahl and the Night Visitors came into existence.  Stravinsky was commissioned to write The Flood, not one of his best pieces, I dare say, but it was premiered on network television.

DeVoto: With Breck commercials.

Levi, laughing: Right.  Such shows were aired 50 years ago on commercial television.  Leonard Bernstein’s The Joy of Music is a transcript of television presentations he gave on Alastair Cooke’s Omnibus program for CBS. And what is the situation now?  Soon after I arrived at Harvard a PBS producer attended my core course on chamber music and declared, “You are a fantastic lecturer. We should put this presentation on PBS.”  He vigorously tried to follow it up, but the people at PBS were not interested. They would appear to think that there is too little interest in classical music to justify such a program.

DeVoto and Eiseman, insieme: Except for the Three Tenors.

Levin: We do have this issue, but it has to be seen in a larger context.  I don’t single out classical music, because I think all these things point to a certain kind of blindness.

What people call the Mozart effect is interesting. Some people say it is stuff and nonsense. I don’t think it is stuff and nonsense, and I’ll tell you why. Anything that turns out to be much more complicated than it seems is worth studying.

Eiseman: Unless you’re introspective you’ll never realize it.

Levin: Schnabel said the problem is that Mozart is too easy for kids and too hard for grownups. Which of course is true, because Mozart’s music reveals every defect that you can imagine – technical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional-everything.  But here’s the thing that is interesting about it. Anybody who hears a piece of Mozart feels that she or he gets it at first hearing. It is understandable: there’s a certain sense in which everything seems completely axiomatic. What makes it subtle emerges only if the listener approaches it with sophistication. In other words, the more you know, the greater it gets. But even if you’re merely at the outer layer, it’s obviously already awfully good.

One day, I started to look at some of the manuscripts and I noticed that they contained some numbers. In the first movement of the E-flat string quintet, K. 614, for example, Mozart writes a number at the end of the first section of the first movement-the part we call the exposition-the spot in so-called sonata form where the players go back to the beginning and repeat what we have heard thus far. And Mozart wrote a number there; and at the very end of the movement he wrote another number. The number that he wrote at the beginning was the number of bars that he had used up to that point, and the number at the end was the number of bars from that point until the end of the piece. He wasn’t counting them, mind you, from line to line, He just wrote them down, and he wrote down the correct number of bars in the first section, and then he wrote down the correct number of bars of the second one.

Why do you suppose he wrote them down? They must have mattered to him. Why did they matter to him? Probably because he was interested in proportions.

Sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s, Wolfgang Plath, one of the century’s leading Mozart scholars and the expert on his musical handwriting, started looking at a sketch leaf that puzzled him. It had some music on it but it had a pile of numbers. As it turns out, Mozart dabbled in number theory. He never went to school for a single day, but he was interested in double and triple factorials-just fooling around on his own with numbers. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t ‘ambidue, ambitre,’ …how you can take numbers and do things. You could think:  maybe it means something, and maybe it doesn’t.

Plath saw these numbers, arranged in three columns. He thought, “I wonder what these numbers could be?  There are hundreds of things they could be I couldn’t possibly figure out 200 years later. They could be receipts for lessons, or concerts, they could be laundry expenses, or food expenses, or God knows what.  Hmmm, is there anything they could be that I could figure out?” And suddenly, he thought, “Bar counts. They could be bar counts. But wait a minute. Three big columns…If it were a sonata, there could be only three numbers per column; in a symphony or string quartet, there would be only four; with five or six, or seven, maybe it could be a divertimento or some other occasional piece. But this is a long series of numbers in each column, so it cannot possibly be one of those. What could it be?

“Wait!  An opera. It could be an opera. …

“All right.  Let’s look at this more carefully. Is there any music on this sketch leaf I can date?  Yes…here is something from 1782. What opera did Mozart write in 1782? Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K.384.”

Plath then proceeded to take out the score of The Abduction from the Seraglio.  The first number of column 1 was the bar count of the overture.  The second one was Belmonte’s first aria from Act I…and so on.  Plath hit the jackpot. Not only that:  there was a number in the third act-24-that came before the chorus of janissaries.  But the autograph score has no 24-bar piece there.  It does, however, refer to the fact that a march should come before that chorus, in spite of the fact that there is no trace of the march in the autograph.  When Gerhard Croll was editing The Abduction from the Seraglio for the New Mozart Edition – Neue Mozart-Ausgabe – he consulted not just the autograph, but all surviving early manuscript copies.  And one of them did contain a march before the janissaries chorus.  And guess how long it was?  Yup, 24 bars.

So – Mozart adds up the bars of each of the three acts of his opera and compares their length. Now what other composer is doing that kind of thing? In the 20th century people are juggling numbers in all sorts of ways.

Norton: Did Bach ever do this sort of thing?

Levin: Bach certainly employs numerology in his compositions.

DeVoto: Cantata 80, supposedly.

Levin: Mozart – Mark, you can probably put the lie on this -is one of the only, if not the only, composer that I know who in every single one of his mature operas ends in the same key in which it began. Wagner doesn’t do that. Verdi doesn’t do that. How many cases are there of such a thing in other great operatic composers such as Wagner or Verdi?

DeVoto: Meistersinger.

Levin: Excellent. But it is the only Wagner that does it. You could almost call it a coincidence, because it’s obviously not that important to him. Maybe C major in Meistersinger is an important sound…

DeVoto: If you start Das Rheingold in the second scene, D flat major, then it works.

Laughter by all.

Levin: But that’s cheating! In Mozart, The Magic Flute begins and ends in E-flat major, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Così fan tutte and La Clemenza di Tito start and end in C, and The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni begin and end in D. … It’s the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action, but writ large.

DeVoto: All right.

Levin: The sense of continuation between the arias, the key schemes that he uses, how they work, are done in a way that you need not notice, but there is something absolutely ineffable and ultimately inevitable about when they are obvious, like going from C major to G major, or when they’re slightly coloristic, like G major to E-flat major, but they will never go from G major to F major, for instance. Things like that won’t do it, because they don’t mix well.

DeVoto: Falstaff.

Levin: Yes, you will find individual operas by composer that do this, but you will find no composer other than Mozart who is systematic about it. And so there he is, he’s counting bars, he’s looking at proportions, he is observing certain kinds of unities. I mean, does anybody care, after four hours, whether the opera ends in the same key it began? Does anybody remember?

Eiseman: Anna Russell.

Mimicry by Levin:  “… we’re right back where we started from!”,  followed by general laughter.

Levin: The thing about it is, this is music that masquerades as so unbelievably simple-minded; but in the typical first movement of a Mozart concerto, there are as many as 10 to 12 different ideas.

Norton: Do you think the Masonic connection had anything to do with it?

Levin: Masonry certainly figures in some of his works. The Magic Flute has symbolism-numbers-derived from Freemasonry. No question about that. But what I am talking about is something which is much larger than an individual piece.

I got a call a from John Allen, a National Catholic reporter, about two years ago, after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, asking me about Mozart and the Masons, because a lot of Catholics seemed to be upset. Mr. Allen wanted me to assure him that Mozart had nothing to do with the Masons, and that his relationship with Freemasonry was just a very superficial thing.  I told him,  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything like that.”  He said, “Oh, this is very bad.” I said, “Look, would a man who didn’t care about the Masons not only have joined but persuaded his best friend Haydn to join, and his father to join, and be a member of a lodge and written something like a half a dozen pieces for performance there?”

DeVoto: He was a Roman Catholic.

Levin: … and was a good Catholic, but also wrote The Magic Flute, which is fraught with Masonic symbology. I said, “No I’m afraid that won’t do,” and he said, “Oh, this is really bad.” I said, “Why is it really bad?” He said, “You, know, some people are upset because Pope Benedict XIV plays Mozart on the piano nearly every day. What kind of a Catholic was Mozart?” I said, “He was as Catholic as everybody in Austria or southern Germany was a Catholic. It was axiomatic. You don’t even ask about it. There was no such thing as being a doubting or a suspicious Catholic. He wrote radiant music for the Catholic Church.  It was a definition of his life. He lived within the sacraments. There was no such thing as being irreligious when you are somebody who was brought up in that sort of way.”

DeVoto: They still had the altered Credo: the text et in unam sanctam catolicam apostolicam ecclesiam is deleted from the credo in all the Schubert masses.

Levin: But not in Mozart’s masses, which contain that clause.

DeVoto: That was a was a papal dispensation, I was told.

Levin: It wouldn’t surprise me. But I felt obliged to assure Mr. Allen that Mozart was a good Catholic. He said, “Well, you know, Masons were excommunicated.” I said, “WHEN? When the pope was still a political figure who controlled the papal states, and Avignon, and so on.  Then it was a matter of sedition. Look, what is the issue? The Masons want to give human beings a square deal on this earth and the Catholics take the eternal view. There is absolutely nothing in these philosophies that need at all to be in argument. I should think that anybody who’s worried about His Holiness playing Mozart, should be told that to the extent that His Holiness does play Mozart, to that extent he will be a better pope,” and that is what I told Mr. Allen.

…Laughter.

Levin: And he printed it, God bless him![3]

[1] Harvard’s Music Department houses the Isham Collection, for Ralph Isham (1865-) a railroad executive and real estate investor who graduated from Harvard College in 1889, He and subsequently his widow have donated funds for the Appleton Chapel organ and very valuable collections of music manuscripts, scores, &c.

[2] Annette Dieudonné, friend and colleague of Nadia Boulanger, taught Solfège at at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris and at Fontainebleau.

[3] The article by John L. Allen Jr. appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, September 1, 2006.

Robert D. Levin, a world-wide acclaimed classical performer, composer, and musicologist, is Dwight P. Robinson Professor of Humanities in the Music Department of Harvard University. At a recent meeting with Eiseman, executive editor Bettina A. Norton, and musicologist and composer Mark DeVoto, Levin commented on the role of the Intelligencer.

Eiseman: Presuming that there is such a thing as musical intelligence in Boston, I wonder whether musical intelligence and musical instruction have been in a steady state of decline for the past 200 years. I wonder if the dead-cat bounce has occurred yet. The Puritans required every pupil in the public schools  to learn the equivalent of solfège so that they could chant the Psalms. And by 1880, according to John Sullivan Dwight, there was still enough interest in the subject to provoke a debate about fixed or moveable Do in musical instruction in the Boston Public Schools.

Levin: A guest teacher tried to teach me moveable Do in the third grade, and I got into a knock-down drag-out fight with her. …Well, I was eight years old. I had no idea what movable Do was, but I thought it was absolutely the biggest crock that you could ever imagine. She chalked an A major scale up on the blackboard and wrote Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do. I exclaimed, “No no no; that’s La Ti Do Re Mi Fa Sol La!” She said, “What are you talking about?” And my homeroom teacher rejoined, “Bobby, just let her teach what she wants to teach and keep quiet!”

Eiseman: But the the idea, that in the 1880s the Mayor of Boston and the head of the schools were debating this? And until the 1960′s, any elementary schoolteacher in Massachusetts had to have some piano proficiency to get a teaching certificate? Now music education is considered a luxury.

Levin: Yes, but so are mathematics.

Eiseman: Except, there are tests for that. Preparing for them, and -

Levin: Not very well, it turns out. Lee, I wouldn’t single out music. Not that I don’t share your dismay. But at first, when you said over the last 200 years, I would have found that exaggerated in terms of professional music education. I would certainly assert that that’s declining too, but I wouldn’t have chosen 200 years as the unit of measure.

Eiseman: But we are not talking about professional education.

Levin: You are talking about lay people…

Eiseman: Yes.

Levin: There’s very little doubt that the awareness of classical music is low, but certainly in university settings it’s balanced by the fact that there remains a very vibrant percentage of student bodies that is very interested in playing this stuff, and the concerts that they play are very well attended.

Eiseman: By students.

Levin: Yes, absolutely. I think Harvard is a very good example of that. Unlike many land-grant universities there is no way for a violinist to get a degree in playing violin at Harvard, or the piano, or the flugelhorn, or the drums. Student musicians Students have to get a degree in something else. Yet the sheer number of music organizations that are run entirely by students is astonishing, and the attendance, primarily, but not exclusively, by students is very, very high.

Eiseman: How much can you generalize from a Harvard experience?

Levin: I have visited many other schools and had a chance to observe these things. One of the more interesting interfaces I had with the larger picture occurred six years ago, when during the summer, Harvard was sponsoring a conclave of high school superintendents from all over the country, who gathered at Harvard. They were given the opportunity to have contact with various faculty members representing Harvard’s far-flung spheres of activity, and somebody got in touch with me, said they wanted to something that involved the music department or music, and might I make a presentation? I said, “Sure. What would you like to talk about?”
I thought about that audience and I said, “I think I’d like to talk about ‘Who cares if Classical Music Dies?’” It’s a talk l I’ve given a number of times. Six months ago, one of my colleagues at BU, Jaf Yudkin, has a lunch-time debate series there, and he invites people to come over. He usually has the guest talk first and gives himself the last word, and then the noontime audience votes on which side it supports. His point was that classical music is DEAD… and was hopeless, and so on. I insisted on being last and gave an impassioned speech about this whole thing. And to his astonishment the vote went my way.

My presentation was a combination of trying to show how Classical music makes you smart by setting up certain kinds of axioms and paradigms that make the listener participate, that make creates expectations, so that one is self-satisfied when getting what one expects and intrigued when one doesn’t. I chose one of the finest of the Mozart piano sonatas, the D Major K. 576, which is a perfect example of how that all works, because, you always get what you expected, only it’s so more imaginative than what you expect. You are constantly getting the sense that what you’ve heard is half of what you’re gong to hear, so you are projecting upwards, you are building the architecture as a listener, right along with the composer. If your mind can be made to work that way, on all levels, and not just on a musical level, obviously your ability to cope with the challenges of everyday life, to say nothing of your specialized area and your career, are gong to be enhanced. So I wanted to show that Classical music is more than just something which as a cultural artifact is a Good Thing. I wanted to try to show that Classical music has a great deal to do with mental processes. I also talked about what happens when this kind of area of culture is undermined. I lived in Europe over a thirteen-year period and continue to spend a great deal of time in numerous European countries. Over that long period I have frequently discussed politics, matters of social importance and cultural issues, with my musician and non-musician friends, including bank presidents, lawyers, and other professionals. On numerous occasions I have asked a question that nobody over there was able to answer correctly, which surprised me. The question that I asked them was, can you name the country which has existed for the longest time in history under a single constitution? Unless I am mistaken it is the United States of America, 1787. France has had two Bourbon monarchies, a bourgeois monarchy, two empires, five republics, the Commune, and the Vichy fascist government and Germany’s gotten -

Eiseman: Germany has only been a country since 1870.

Levin: And Italy wasn’t a country until then. England still doesn’t have one. People say Magna Carta, but that is not a constitution. Britain exists on common law. It is very interesting that Europeans are unaware of this fact. Now why am I mentioning this to you? Well, why do people want to come to the United States? People will say, because there’s freedom here. Because there’s unparalleled economic opportunity here? Fine, But where do those notions come from? They come from Western European liberal thought. The music that the framers of the Constitution were listening to, and they were listening to music, was the kind of music we are talking about. I wonder what you think is going to happen when you attempt – or when this country attempts – to divorce its notions of polity from the cultural liberal traditions from which they sprang? I wouldn’t be too optimistic about it. The fact is that how you think about politics, how you think about life, how you think about order, how you think about tolerance, morals, ethics is based on these cultural traditions. I tell my students that a musical performance is a moral act. You get in front of an audience, If you manipulate them, if you try to try to mislead them, if you try to become powerful at their expense, you ‘re Elmer Gantry. A renegade priest is looked upon with contempt and with ire and with outrage by people. Someone who pretends to be a poet that is actually only a cheap egotist betrays the art. But how do we in fact inculcate a sense of morality? There is an acute moral dimension to the present economic crisis, which was precipitated by irresponsible and ultimately unscrupulous financial behavior. The need to regain an ethical anchor for our daily lives is urgent.
Art is crucial because it holds a mirror up to us. It affirms John Donne’s declaration that “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Thee.” I gave a talk like this at Dudley House at Harvard. One of the graduate students who attended raised his hand afterwards and asked a question that to me was breathtaking. He put his finger on the crux of the matter. He inquired, “Are you saying that classical music is the canary in the coal mine?” That is really good. … I told the high school superintendents, you can see go Fellini’s “Orchestra Rehearsal” if you want to see it in a metaphoric way. But playing in an ensemble, learning that your collective responsibility comes from sacrificing some of your own selfish desires but latching onto something which has not just the practical aspect – ‘You’re gonna make a lot of money if you do it, or you’re gonna be successful if you do it’ — but it produces intangible rewards that elate you, that exhilarate you, and that communicate something profound and overwhelming to an audience, this is a powerful metaphor. You play in an orchestra, and you play this kind of music that is not simple Pop music that ends in three minutes 25 seconds, but requires that people pay attention to a narrative and really understand what both order and disorder mean, what destiny means, all of these things, This is something that will turn adolescents into people who function in society in a more responsible and enlightened way.

This is the first of a series of interviews with Intelligencer editor, Robert D. Levin.