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Required reading

November 28, 2024
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I have infinite respect for school teachers. My late wife was one. I was one myself, for six years earlier in my career. Teachers work harder and for less pay that pretty much anyone else I can think of. And more than anyone else, the best teachers I had made me what I became in life. 

But. 

There was something about the teachers I had in public schools — grade school and high school — that mystifies me to this day. It was “required reading.” Nothing against the idea of having students read, but the problem was the books they had us read. 

They were “great books,” unquestionably, and among the best of literature in the English language. But what, I ask, what can a 13 year old possibly make out of The Scarlet Letter? It is written in a rather formal  early 19th century style, about a culture long faded in America, and involving minute shades of thought and feeling, with, like an iceberg, more beneath the surface than above. I was required to read it in eighth grade and was bored silly by it, mostly because I could not possibly understand it. 

I remember one of the test questions on the book. “What is the significance of Hester naming her daughter ‘Pearl?’” Uh — I dunno. I was 13 years old and I had a hard time telling the difference between Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Most likely the book was way over my head. Way over the head of any 13 year old. Which is my point. Why was it assigned? 

My teachers wanted to expose me to the best in literature, I’m sure. And Scarlet Letter is certainly a great novel. I’ve read it as an adult and was amazed at how different it was from the same book I read in eighth grade. Deep and true, and subtle. All of which was lost on a boy with not enough life experience to be able to absorb what I was reading. 

For most kids at that age, a novel was its plot. If I could keep the story clear in my head, that was what I took from the book. So, there were a few assigned books that I read and enjoyed. Oddly, one of them was Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. It was assigned in seventh grade, and it was, at the time, the longest book I had ever read. 

It was no doubt assigned because of the 1959 movie, but I had not yet seen the film, and so I never had to compare the book with Charlton Heston. It was fresh to my eyes. 

But it was a story told without excessive subtlety. If I followed the plot, I got out of the book pretty much all that was put into it by its author. I was 12 and at the time, fascinated by history. Lots of that in Ben-Hur.

It should be pointed out that I had nothing against reading books. I read them all the time. I was an avid reader, but pretty much every book I picked up was non-fiction. (I once complained about novels, “Why would I want to read anything that wasn’t true?” Little did I understand.) I read tons of books about World War II. I was obsessed with the war my father had fought in. 

And so, Ben-Hur was right up my alley. A story clearly told and with little hidden between the lines.  

Another great choice for a young person was To Kill a Mockingbird. As a pubescent teen, I was deeply moved by the injustice and the countering righteousness of Atticus Finch. I read it at a time of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., and it seemed instantly relevant to my life. The fact that it was told through the eyes of 8-year-old Scout, and the moral issues seemed so clear only made it easier to digest at my tender age. 

The novel is still taught in many schools, and is perhaps the perfect book for required reading, although at the age I was asked to read it, I had no clue as to the the fact that its author also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South.

All the subtleties and complexities in the book were irrelevant to my reading it at the perfect age to encounter it. But then, as Flannery O’Connor said, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”

In contrast, we also were assigned The Great Gatsby. On the surface, it is not difficult to understand. The language, unlike that in Scarlet Letter, was reasonably modern. But the book relies almost entirely on what is between the lines, which is exactly the part that a 14-year-old cannot perceive. When I first read it, in eighth grade, I thought it was a story about Nick Carroway. After all, he narrates it. This Gatsby guy seemed entirely peripheral and I couldn’t understand why the book had his name on it. And what the heck were those giant eyeglasses about? And that green light? No clue. 

Oh, I followed the plot well enough, I thought. But boy, I had not the first inkling of what the book was actually about. 

And how could I have. One has to have a decent fill of life’s vicissitudes, disappointments, misunderstandings, loves, longings, sex, ulterior motives — to say nothing of complex, multiple motives — before one can take in all that is going on in Fitzgerald’s book. 

Or any book written for grown-ups. We were assigned The Grapes of Wrath, and I enjoyed most of it, but on the test, we were asked why Chapter Three talks about a turtle crossing a highway. A chapter that fits what Steinbeck calls “hooptedoodle.” In Sweet Thursday, a character says, “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. … Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

And so, Chapter Three seems to have nothing to do with the story. Or does it? At an age before hair began growing in unfamiliar places, I had no clue. 

Worse, the end of the book just seemed like a vaguely smutty joke to make a teen laugh like Beavis and Butthead. Now, as an adult, it makes me weep. 

There were other books assigned that my yet-vacant mind could not get around: Emma, The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist. Why were such books put into the hands of a boy who had not yet outgrown Cocoa Puffs? 

I could barely make it through Emma, and couldn’t for the life of me understand why such a self-involved cupcake should be worthy of my attention (I said to my utterly self-involved teen self). At that age, irony is an unfathomable concept. No one my age at the time should be forced to read Jane Austen. Way above my pay grade at the time. 

And worse, Thomas Hardy. I had no notion of what a reddleman might be, nor furze, nor a heath. Reading the prose was like chewing dry straw. Why, why, O why was this book handed to a pre-teen American boy, who never cut a wisp of furze in his life? 

Last year, I found a used copy of the paperback book I was given back then, so many decades ago, and I began reading it to see if it was as bad as I remembered it, and surprise: I found some of the most resonant, deeply felt writing I’ve ever read. As twilight settles, on the first page of the book: “Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home.” That image rings so instantly true. I’ve been there. When I was a kid, not so much. 

There were other books assigned that memory has happily wiped from my mind. 

But worst of all, and for this I hold Miss Irene Scheider completely guilty, was my lifelong inability to read Charles Dickens. She was otherwise a fine teacher of my eighth grade class, but she decided she would assign each student his own book, chosen by her as the perfect match for his taste and personality. And for me, she chose Oliver Twist. 

I cannot tell you how much I hated, hated, hated that book. I found it turgid, boring, endlessly prolix, and completely unrelatable. I trudged through it dutifully, But I found it the absolute opposite  of anything my taste and personality would have fancied. “Please sir, I want less.” 

No blame should be ascribed to Dickens for this failure. I believe the enthusiasm so many intelligent readers feel for his books. But my experience with Oliver Twist in the eighth grade has ruined Dickens for me for the rest of my life. I cannot even pick up another of his books. My muscles twitch and my eye develops a tick. “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

I understand the impulse of grade school teachers to introduce great lit-rich-your to young minds. But forcing a teenager to read works they are not equipped to comprehend can only deter them from ever wanting to read books they haven’t been assigned. 

I was lucky. I loved reading too much to be thrown off by boring books. I had my own direction. Before high school, most of what I read was non-fiction. I always had a book or two going. Some I read so avidly, I finished them in a day. You could not have stopped me from reading. But I only came to fiction and an appreciation for what it had to afford, after my brain had become fully formed, in my twenties. Then, I attacked all those classics I had dreaded when I was younger. Ulysses, yay! “Madame’s Ovaries,” whoopee! “Lady Loverly’s Chatter,” sign me up! 

I am pretty sure that if you want to instill a love of reading into young minds, you have to let them read what they choose for themselves. Don’t worry if it’s not great literature. Don’t worry even if it’s trash. Or even if it’s comic books. If they enjoy it, they will keep reading. And if they keep reading, they will grow out of the junk and seek the real deal. 

There are books that speak directly to eager minds. The Catcher in the Rye is only possible to read when you are young. Believe me, I tried to re-read it a few years ago and nearly upchucked. It’s not for adults. And there is a huge market for YAF (an acronym that makes me hiccup: Young Adult Fiction) that is surprisingly well written and tackles subject meaningful to their audience. Encourage that. Don’t, my god, hand them Brothers Karamazov. 

So, let them soak up Harry Potter if they want. It’s OK. Better than never being able to read Charles Dickens again. 

Canyon de Chelly

November 23, 2024
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The American Southwest is the landscape of John Ford Westerns, Roadrunner cartoons and, of course George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. It is a landscape I know very well, writing about it often for The Arizona Republic when wearing my hat as travel writer. And while I can’t say I miss big-city Phoenix, I do sometimes feel quite homesick for the desert and the canyons. There is a special sense of space there, of horizons bordered not by trees or homes, but by the curve of the earth. 

But there was a time before that landscape and I became intimate, when my wife and I were teachers in Virginia and first planned a summer vacation trip to the half of the country on the other side of the Mississippi River. We were unprepared, back in 1981, for what we found, having been conditioned primarily by movies, television and the occasional Arizona Highways magazine Christmas edition. 

Driving west on I-40 across the Panhandle of Texas, through Amarillo, the earth was as flat as a billiard table, but at the exact border between Texas and New Mexico, the bottom dropped out of the land and the highway sloped down onto a landscape with buttes and mesas. This is the West, we thought. Finally here. 

On the border between Texas and New Mexico

Carole had always been interested in Indians, and one of the goals of the trip was to visit Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Reservation. In our Eastern ignorance, we pictured the canyon as these steep walls of rock rising up from the land on either side of us. At least, that’s what the photographs looked like. 

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S. Curtis, 1904

But we had it backwards. Canyons are not cliffs rising up, but great holes dug below the surface. 

We were lucky, we approached Canyon de Chelly from the east. Most people arrive through the town of Chinle, to the immediate west of the canyon. Chinle is a tourist trap of motels and souvenirs. But coming to it, as we did, there was nothing but pine covered mountains and rocky wilderness. We drove in on an unpaved road — Navajo Route 7 through Sawmill — from New Mexico and coming up to an unmarked fork in the road, we saw a Navajo man sitting next to his pickup truck, which was piled with firewood. We asked him the way to the canyon. He said nothing but turned his head and lifted his chin to point the way. We continued down a wooded hill into a low scrub land, looking across the plain, and I noticed a darker spot in the sun-splashed land. When we pulled over and parked and walked to that spot, it was 400 feet straight down to the bottom of the canyon. It was somewhat like viewing a negative instead of a photograph: It was all backward. It was down, not up. It was Bat Canyon, one of the side shoots of Monument Canyon, one of the many side canyons to the main event. 

Of course, we slapped our foreheads (figuratively), because, of course, a canyon is an empty space, not a mountain range. Later as we continued on and found Chinle, and a motel for the night, we realized also how lucky we were to have found the canyon for ourselves, and not through the tourist muck. We had that side canyon all to ourselves. We sat alone on the rim looking down into the abyss for hours, listening to the breeze and the birds, before another car even drove by. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument covers 131 square miles in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Seen from the air or on a map, it is a chicken-foot shape of multiple canyon systems that runs for about 24 miles toward the east and the Chuska Mountains. 

Most tourists in Arizona head straight for the Grand Canyon, which is vastly larger and more immediately impressive. “Most famous places are always at least a little disappointing when you finally get there,” my brother once said, “but not the Grand Canyon. You just gawk at it, bigger than you had ever imagined.” 

But some of us love the human size of Canyon de Chelly even more than the Grand Canyon. Many days you can pick a corner and have it all to yourself. 

We went back many times, after we moved to Arizona, and Canyon de Chelly became a kind of talisman for us. One summer, probably 1998, we decided to hire a Native guide and ride horses into the canyon’s further reaches. We found Dave Wilson, who arranged for us to go up Canyon del Muerto on horses. His teen sons Delbert and Delmar came along, too. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument is divided into two main forks, the southerly one is Canyon de Chelly itself, the more northern is Canyon del Muerto. The national monument’s name is a redundancy, like “Table Mesa” or “Glendale,” since its name derives from the Navajo word for “canyon” — Tsegi — turned by quasi-French transliteration into Chelly, pronounced “Shay.” (There is also a Tsegi Canyon on the Navajo Reservation, near Kayenta, further complicating matters).  

Mummy Cave

Canyon de Muerto, or “Canyon of the Dead” got its name in 1882, when topographical engineer James Stevenson discovered two prehistoric mummified bodies in a rock shelter ruin, now known as Mummy Cave, and then named the north branch of the place Canyon de los Muertos, now shortened to Canyon del Muerto. 

It could have been named for other reasons. Humans have lived in Canyon de Chelly for about 5,000 years. Long before the Navajo arrived, the prehistoric Anasazi peoples lived in the area and in Canyon de Chelly had built cliff dwellings to protect them from various warring groups. Those ruins are still to be seen in the canyons. And even after the Athabascan-speaking peoples, now called Navajo, arrived, sometime around 1700, the canyon continued to provide shelter from raids and wars with other tribes. It’s a long history of wars, battles and skirmishes, but two occasions stand out more recently. 

First, in 1805, Spanish forces, under Antonio Narbona trapped about 150 Navajo in a cave high on the walls of the canyon. In his report Narbona  stated “They entrenched themselves in an almost inaccessible spot, and fortified beforehand, we succeeded after having battled all day long with the greatest ardor and effort, in taking it the morning after and that our arms had the result of 90 dead warriors, 25 women and children and as prisoners three warriors, eight women and 22 boys and girls.” That cave is now called Massacre Cave. 

Massacre Cave 

Then, in 1863, the American Army began an attempt to bring the Navajo to a new reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, and Col. Christopher (“Kit”) Carson was tasked with rounding the Indians up to march them 300 miles to their new home. He had been given orders to destroy their crops and livestock, and the famous peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly. By March of 1864, some 2,400 Navajo had been collected and marched to New Mexico in the “Long Walk.” Thousands followed in later roundups. 

And so, there has been plenty of muerto in Canyon del Muertos. 

It might be a good place here to discuss Navajo superstitions and taboos. The canyon is filled with Anasazi ruins — good sturdy brick homes that just need a bit of sprucing up and new roofs. But taboos keep the Navajo from using them, or even entering them. Death is a principle taboo. A person’s name who has died should not be uttered. If someone dies in a hogan, traditionally, you move out and no one ever lives in it again. 

There are many more — a list of them could make a book. One online posting names more than 200 such superstitions. Do not look at lightning in a mirror or it will strike your hogan. Do not watch clouds moving in the sky or you will become a slow runner. If you see a shooting star, you have to blow at it or you will receive bad luck. Do not put salt on a piñon nut or it will snow. Do not kill grasshoppers or it will give you a nosebleed. 

We already encountered one, when the Navajo man with the pickup indicated the road to take by pointing with his chin and pooched lips. Pointing with a finger is considered aggressive. 

In 1993, I went to visit famous Navajo painter Jimmy Toddy in his home in Wide Ruins, on the Reservation. Unlike the hogans he had grown up in, or the ranch houses that pass for government housing on the Reservation, in 1947, he built a two-story frame house with a stone foundation. I parked in the dust of his front yard and entered through a front door that was off its hinges. “I never fixed it,” he told me. “There are bees that made a hive there and it would bring bad luck if I didn’t let them fly anywhere inside or outside.” 

At the newspaper where I worked, I became friends with Betty Reid, a Navajo reporter. She asked me to help her copy edit a proposal for a book she was planning. 

“Yuhzhee is my Navajo name,” she said. “It means ‘short,’ or ‘small’ in English.” She spoke only Navajo until she was seven and her family, who raised sheep, lived near the edge of the Grand Canyon at a place called  Bii Daa. “I’m a middle-age journalist who walked away from a traditional life to write for newspapers,” she said. “The two worlds are very different.”

I once asked her about the superstitions. “Yes, we are very superstitious.” “Do you believe in them still?” I asked. “Oh, no. Very few younger Navajos still hold on to such things. They make no sense.”

She paused a beat. “I still do them, though.” 

But back to 1998. My wife, Carole, had been fascinated by Indians and Indian culture since she was a little girl and collected arrowheads turned up by North Carolina farmers plowing their fields. She had always wanted to ride horses with Indians, and now she was getting her chance with Dave Wilson. 

We drove to his home, on a bluff just above the entrance to the canyons. His wife invited us in as Dave got the horses ready. It seemed like a very ordinary ranch house with modest furnishings, except that it had a dirt floor and just by the front door was a TV console with its tube removed, letting it serve as a home for a few chickens. 

I had never ridden a horse before, if you don’t count a pony ride at the state fair when I was a little boy. Dave assured us his horses were used to beginners and it would be easy. Just follow him.

We mounted the horses and followed Dave and his two sons, each on his own horse. He didn’t lead us down a road, but straight down the side of the hill, at a precipitous angle. I had to lean back so far in the saddle, my head rested on my horse’s rump. Luckily, the horse knew what he was doing. I certainly didn’t. Their hooves slid and kicked up gravel the whole way down. 

At the bottom of the hill, it flattened out and we rode into the canyon mouth, turning left into Canyon del Muerto. My horse was balking. It lagged behind the rest and they had to stop so I could catch up. At one point the horse, apparently impatient, began to trot after the others and I feared I would fall off. New Jersey boys make poor cowboys. 

What can I say? Not only was I a poor equestrian, but my body was not built for the saddle. One sees bow-legged cowpokes in the movies, who have long acclimatized to the barrel-shaped body of a horse, but my straight legs were agonizingly twisted to the stirrups, feeling like my knee cartilage was being torn sideways from my leg bones. It was a form of Medieval torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

Carole, on the other hand, was in horse heaven. I tried to last through the first few miles, but eventually, I had to get off and let my legs assume their normal lines. I limped around my sturdy mount, trying to regain the use of my knee joints. 

Dave had, no doubt, come across such greenhorns before and kindly offered to continue our tour of the canyon by car, and sent one of his sons back out of the canyon to bring back his station wagon. About 20 minutes later, it arrived and we all got in and began the tour again. The older son led the horses back home. 

But then, the car got a flat tire. Neither Dave, nor his remaining son, Delbert, cussed or fumed, but acted as if this were just a normal course of events. We got out and waited. Dave took out the spare, but it was flat, too. He never expressed any emotion about it all. It’s just normal. 

Carole on horseback; Delbert Wilson drawing; me, standing

Other tour cars passed us, other horse tours. But Dave never said a word to any of them, never asked for help. We sat in the sand for perhaps two hours. Delbert began drawing in the wet sand with a stick, to the delight of Carole, who was an art teacher. The sun went behind the canyon walls and it began to darken. 

It must have been about 7 p.m. when another car arrived, driven by Dave’s wife. We all got in and drove back out the canyon and up to Dave’s house (taking the road this time), where they apologized for the cock-up. They offered to feed us supper, but Carole wanted to get back to our motel. Dave’s wife gave Carole a gift of a small necklace and we all smiled and thanked one another. 

The impassivity that Dave showed with the problems we faced, we came to know as one of the cultural characteristics of the Navajo — which we learned over time with the many other Navajos we came to know and become friends with. I don’t know what Dave was feeling inside, but outwardly, it was all the same to him. 

When we got back to Phoenix, we mailed a box of presents up to the Wilsons. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument is situated on land owned by the Navajo nation, and travel in the park is open only to tribal members or those accompanied by authorized Navajo guides, such as Dave Wilson. The only exception to that is a public trail from the cliff edge down to the White House Ruins, about five miles up from the canyon mouth. You walk down a steep path, 600 feet down through switchbacks and tunnels to the canyon floor. The trail is about 2.5 miles long and leaves you at the foot of White House Ruins, an Anasazi cliff dwelling, first built around A.D. 1060. 

The pueblo originally had an estimated 80 rooms, on two levels, with some featuring a light plaster, which led to the Navajo name for the site, Kinii’ ni gai — which means “White House.” 

White House ruins by O’Sullivan, Gilpin, Adams, and me

The cliffs above the ruins are streaked with desert varnish, a mix of iron and manganese oxide, that makes a visual scene that is absolute catnip to photographers. The first photo of the ruins and the varnish was made in 1873 by Timothy O’Sullivan, but a parade of others have followed, including Laura Gilpin in 1930, Ansel Adams in 1950 (having made an almost identical photo in 1942), and me in 1981. Gilpin visited and studied the Navajos and the land they occupy and published, in 1968, the classic book, The Enduring Navajo. It is still in print. 

The scene absolutely frames itself, which means that hosts of images are basically repeats. 

Photos by Tad Nichols, 1931; Jerry Jacka, 1976; Don Whitebread, 2009;  Patrick McBride, 2012; Richard Boutwell, 2017

It’s a highly tempting subject and I’m sure that many other tourists have made the same picture, now with their iPhones. 

Without getting down into the canyon, you can drive along its rim, both along the south branch and the north, with overlooks at such famous vistas as Spider Rock and Massacre Cave. 

You stand at the rim of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation and look down to the braided stream at the bottom that scoured this great hole out of the sandstone and wonder how long it must have taken. Then you see the tiny Anasazi relics built into the walls of the rock and realize how long people have been living here, and then you see the sandstone itself an think about how much longer ago — exponentially longer — that ancient river deltas deposited the silt that later became that stone.

We visited Canyon de Chelly many times, and at one point, Carole applied for a teaching job on the Reservation. We drove up for an interview, but the terms of the employment contract would have made it difficult to ever afford to live there — the 10-month contract came with a 10-month lease on a home, meaning we would have to leave with all our belongings during the summer months. It was clear they would rather have a Navajo teacher than a bilagáana. We couldn’t begrudge them that. 

Click on any image to enlarge

I like Tchike

November 10, 2024
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When you have ideas where your ears should be, you can be such a self-righteous moron. My Tchaikovsky problem is a case in point. I wasted years not listening to his music. What I thought closed my ears to what I might hear. 

When I was a boy, longer ago than even your parents can remember, the music of Tchaikovsky was easy to love — all those sweeping tunes and swelling fiddles. His music was, in that antediluvian age, pretty well ubiquitous. Concert halls played his symphonies, pianists conquered the Soviet Union playing his piano concerto, and supermarkets offered LP specials for 49 cents with grocery purchases. And that is where I was first exposed to the Nutcracker Suite, played by an anonymous orchestra and conductor (Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite was on the “B” side). 

My parents bought successive volumes from the supermarket and I became exposed to “The World’s Greatest Music,” including Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the Brahms Second, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and all of those now-familiar war horses a friend of mine used to call “The Loud Classics.” 

A few years on, as puberty hit, it was music like Tchaikovsky’s that spoke to me, with its pile-driven emotional excess and immediacy. My insides swelled with powerful feelings. That sort of “heart-on-sleeve” thrum speaks to those newly activated hormones. 

But then, unfortunately, I became smarter, learned more, read what critics had written. I discovered that such music was trivial, shallow, showy and unserious and learned how wrong I had been. My taste turned to Beethoven’s late quartets and Bach’s unaccompanied violin works. That was serious music. 

This is something that happens to many of us when we are becoming adults and presume to take on more grown-up tastes, pretending to understand more than we actually can. Ideas about the music supersedes what we actually hear. 

And so, for the next 40 years or so, I disdained listening to much Tchaikovsky. Occasionally I would spin the Pathetique on the record player. It, after all, had a second movement in 5/4 time. Like Dave Brubeck. 

Looking back, I realize that the musical culture was traveling much the same route as I was taking. Music that had been pilloried for being too “modern” and “dissonant” became more mainstream. One could hear Bartok or Stravinsky in the concert halls, played alongside Beethoven and Sibelius. And musicians and conductors, grown up in the same era as I did, shared much of my taste. Tchaikovsky slowly became out of fashion. Astringent drowned out lush.

It was still played, of course, but less frequently, and by orchestras and conductors more simpatico with Modernist esthetics than the tired old Romanticism. Stravinsky had stated, in no uncertain terms “Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” And Toscanini has said Beethoven’s Eroica was not about heroism, but about “E-flat.” (Neither man actually believed their own words, and their music and music-making prove that, but their words proved highly influential). 

Toscanini also said, “Tradition is only the last bad performance.” But tradition is the very heart of any classical music — music handed down from one generation of masters to a younger generation. Whether it is Indian classical music, Japanese Noh flute playing, or Pablo Casals teaching Bernard Greenhouse (of the Beaux Arts Trio) and Greenhouse teaching Paul Katz, onetime cellist of the Cleveland Quartet) it is tradition that defines it. 

Orchestras and conductors who had learned their art before the 20th century and continued the traditions up through, perhaps 1970 or so, had the music in their old bones, understood how it was meant to go, and how the musical arguments played out in the notes. But the older musicians died out and the younger generation taking charge had a more “objective” view of the music. A tradition was dying. 

You can hear this by comparing any Tchaikovsky symphony recorded by Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985) or Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) with the same performed by Andris Nelsons (b. 1978) or Vladimir Jurowski (b. 1972). The younger players play the notes clearly and cleanly, even with excellent musicianship, but notes and music are different things. The younger generation grew up with Stravinsky or Prokofiev and had no problem with their complex scores. It was a shift in sensibilities. Younger musicians can breeze through Le Sacre du Printemps perfectly, while many old recordings show esteemed conductors fumbling through, missing accents and here and there. It’s a new tradition. (And I’m not even talking about “historically informed performance practice.”) 

But in the 19th century music, the older conductors knew much the younger generation had no grasp of. They knew how the music “went.” What it was saying. 

The true divide between the old and new were the World Wars and millions of dead. And especially after the genocide of the Second World War, it was no longer possible to believe in such old ideas as nobility or heroism. And music about such things no longer rang true. Listen to the version of Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes performed by Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, from 1978 and you hear all the notes, and certainly there is excitement. But listen then to the 1929 performance by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Willem Mengelberg, and you hear music that believes what it is saying. There is an earnestness to it, a fervor, that feels second-hand in the Masur recording. The difference between a hero and an actor playing a hero.

 And so, I and the generations that grew up with me and after me no longer had the stomach to hear such “universal” emotions as Tchaikovsky tried to evoke in his music. Nothing universal could be trusted anymore, and the grand statements of fate and tradition were dumped.

I remember when teaching, a student pushed back on something I had said. “It’s all relative,” she said. “Nothing is true. It is your truth or my truth, but nothing is universally true.” It was a common belief for her generation. And given the “truths” espoused by various institutions that were shown to be mere self-serving hypocrisy after Watergate, after “I did not have sex with that woman,” and most of all, after Auschwitz, it was hard to fault her. 

But I replied: “There is one truth that is universal. You will die. I will die. All living things will die.” That, I said, is the starting point for all art. After that, we look for anything else that we may make art from. Second truth follows from the first: The people you love will die, and many of those will die before you and you will suffer loss. How do you react to that loss? Yes, some Victorian pieties seem like sentimental claptrap to us now, but the impulse behind them is very real, and we can react to that reality. 

And so, when I hear Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, I feel deeply in my psyche the sense of death and loss inherent in the harmonies and melodies, and I am moved. Deeply moved. If the stylistic idiosyncrasies of his age are not ours, the underlying emotions are. 

It is incumbent upon us, as listeners (and readers, and theater audiences) not to be deaf to the content of art. Yes, some music is meant only as divertissement, as Mozart serenades or Schubert ländler, but the more ambitious pieces — symphonies, operas, even ballets — are responses to the larger questions. Not only death or loss, but the subsequent propositions built from those original two: What is happiness, what is narrative, what is rhythm and physical movement and how does it all reflect the experience of being alive? 

If you listen to Tchaikovsky’s music with ears instead of ideas, you hear not only emotions both bright and dark, but extraordinary melody and harmony, often rather advanced for its time, and unparalleled brilliance of orchestration. 

Even so minor a piece as his Nutcracker ballet is built from absolute crystal gems of sound combinations. Pure genius. 

The disdain so many now feel for the music of Tchaikovsky, or, for that matter, Rachmaninoff, or others of their era, is, as far as I am concerned, unearned, and merely an expression of ignorance. One should never cut oneself off from such delight, pleasure, and the emotions evoked. One should never close off one’s ears to music, or let ideas about the music take charge.