Archive

Tag Archives: dave hurwitz

YouTube — MyTube

August 24, 2026
Uncategorized
Leave a comment

In Genesis 18, when Jehovah was still on speaking terms with humans, He negotiated with Abraham over the fate of the city of Sodom. Jehovah had decided to destroy the place, and all its wicked inhabitants, but Abraham said, “Whoa, there,” and asked, but what if there are 50 righteous men in the city (women apparently didn’t count), will you destroy the righteous along with the wicked? Jehovah paused, perhaps stroking His whiskers. “OK, then, if there are 50 righteous men…” 

“But what if there are only 45?” asked Abe. Jehovah pondered. “What if only 30? Or only 10?” The Almighty allowed, most likely in a voice of pique, since He was not accustomed to pushback: “I will not destroy it for the sake of 10.” 

(Let the record show that in Genesis 19, Jehovah rained down His fire and brimstone anyway and flattened the cities of the plain, saving only Abraham’s brother, Lot, and Lot’s family. Not quite 10 of them.)

I thought about this haggling between the patriarch and his boss, and I realized that whole thing might apply to YouTube as well. What a sewer of AI slop, ignorant ranting, political bloviating, fanboy nonsense and religious sophistry. 

Should we destroy the whole shebang? But what if there are 50 sites that have value? What if only 45? Or 30, or 10? 

I have enjoyed YouTube for years, but I have to avoid almost everything offered by my new Almighty Deity: the Algorithm. Most of what It thinks I might find interesting is pointless, useless, misleading, stupid and downright wrong. 

But there are a few sites that I go to frequently, either because I learn things from them, or I like the presenter, or they are genuinely entertaining. I thought I’d discuss a few of them and recommend them to likeminded individuals, pace the Algorithm. 

THE GREEN BOYS

The brothers Green, elder John and younger Hank, can be said to have justified the existence of YouTube all by their lonesomes. They have contributed to the “reduction in world suck” more than most can have dreamed of. 

In 2007, they began posting videos on YouTube as “letters” back and forth, from one brother to the other, mostly twice a week, one from John, in Indiana, to Hank, in Montana, and another from Hank to John. That took off as the Vlog Brothers, and became not just a family news catch-up, but each brother talking about whatever interesting thing had caught their fancy. And they were a very thoughtful pair. 

John was an enormously successful author of Young Adult Fiction, and Hank was a budding science explainer. More than that, Hank shot out ideas like a Roman candle, and soon, they started up a host of other YouTube sites. They developed a devoted online following for their endeavors, informally called “nerdfighters.” 

Hank and John with the Nerdfighter hand gesture

Nerdfighteria was largely made up of young idealistic people, wanting to make and inhabit a better world. In the Brothers Green, they found two young men who could be non-ironic and sincere without ever becoming sentimental or mawkish (the concomitant sins of earnestness). 

They have since become an industry, pumping out scads of entertaining and educational content, and managing to do practical good in the world. 

Together, in 2012, they developed Crash Course, a series of educational videos, meant primarily for high school students, that explained episodes of world history, and concepts of biology. Crash Course was eventually picked up by PBS and expanded to series on English literature, U.S. history, chemistry, psychology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, government and politics, economics, and philosophy. Each series used animation and cleverly written explanations and video to make the major points of the discipline clear and entertaining. Eventually, there were some 50 Crash Course series made. They are commonly used in classrooms across the world. 

Parallel to Crash Course came SciShow, a group of series more specifically aimed at science education. There was also The Brain Scoop, with Emily Graslie, which looked at the practical side of science and research; Sexplanations, with Lindsey Doe, about human sexuality; Crash Course Kids, for younger viewers; PBS Eons, a history of life on earth; The Art Assignment, with Sarah Urist Green (John’s museum curator wife); and my favorite, Journey to the Microcosmos, in which Hank Green narrates microphotographic video footage of protozoan life, one of the most hauntingly beautiful and hypnotic series on YouTube. 

(It should be mentioned that Hank Green has also performed and recorded five albums of his own music, written two science fiction novels, performed a stand-up comedy show, and created Focus Friend, an app designed to temporarily block other apps, to allow easily distracted people to focus on the task at hand — an app named “App of the Year” in 2025. He has also devised a series of fund-raising not-for-profit businesses, selling everything from designer socks to artisanal coffees. The man is a dynamo.)

Hank Green’s “Hanklerfish” logo — “Don’t Forget To Be Awesome”

The brothers set up a not-for-profit company, called Complexly, to oversee all their projects, including over 10,000 videos and has built a substantial audience on YouTube, with more than 32 million subscribers and 55 million views per month. It collaborates with institutions and organizations such as PBS, Arizona State University, the National Science Foundation, and The Poetry Foundation to expand its reach and, according to industry sources, as of July, 2026, Complexly employs 134 people. 

Meanwhile, directed by the brothers, Nerdfighteria has raised millions for philanthropic causes, including some $50 million toward the construction of the first maternity hospital in Sierra Leone, which opened earlier this year. That country had the highest infant mortality rate in the world, but that rate has now been halved. 

There are other fundraising and charitable organizations the Green boys have created, including the annual Project for Awesome event, that has, since 2010, raised more than $30 million for various charities, under its parent organization, The Foundation to Decrease World Suck. 

And there’s Pizzamas, a two week event each September when Nerdfighter merch is sold and the receipts given to various charities. (The insignia for Pizzamas is a shirt with the image of John with his ill-advised — and temporary — mustache.)

John also led a Nerdfighter campaign to persuade pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson to allow generic versions of the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline to be produced, for sale in countries with high TB rates, making it cheaper for poor countries. (He also wrote a best-selling book, Everything is Tuberculosis, about the history and epidemiology of the disease. A best-seller — did I mention that?)

When they started online, their target viewership was ages 13 to 30, but both brothers are now in their 40s, and perhaps their fans have aged along with them, but younger audiences have continued to sign on. Their attitude and vocabulary skews young, but I’m 78, and I’m hooked. 

I’ve only skirted the bounds of Nerdfighteria. There are also the podcasts, and the books (and the films made from John’s books). When I say they are an industry, I am not exaggerating. 

Journey to the Microcosmos

BUT WAIT — THERE’S MORE

There is no end to YouTube videos. Most are of limited interest, at least to me. But there are a bunch I regularly check out when they post new entries. These are not all of them, but a recommended sample.

DAVID HURWITZ

The Green brothers are frighteningly prolific, but David Hurwitz is no slouch, producing an average of three new videos every day. He is a classical music critic and editor of the online magazine Classics Today. 

His videos are uniformly produced, as he sits at his desk in front of shelves and shelves of CDs, occasionally interrupted by his cats, and he talks about classical music recordings, both historical and current. He is lively and engaged. I have thousands of CDs on my shelves, but his must number in the hundreds of thousands, and he seems to have instant recall for all of them. 

I find myself simpatico with most of his taste, although he has a few blind spots and undeserving enthusiasms. He can’t mention Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole without making a retching noise, and it seems anything conductor Charles Mackerras records is perfection personified. And he will tell you, for every performance, whether the tam-tam has been featured properly. At times his uninflected enthusiasms remind me of the old radio host DeKoven. (How many are old enough to remember him?) 

Classical music may be a niche subject for most Americans, but for those of us who have been listening to our Beethoven and Bartok for 60 years, Hurwitz is a joy. I watch him daily on the iPad while eating my breakfast. 

MAP MEN

The Map Men is a British video channel and is either an educational channel that is comic, or a pair of comedians talking about geography. And it is very funny. I mean laugh-out-loud funny. 

In it Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones dress up in costumes, add animations, write songs, and generally act out their themes with one-liners, sight gags, puns, and the ear-worm theme song: “Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men.” 

They take on such subjects as how many countries are there in the world (it is not an easy answer); why is north at the top of the maps; why the Netherlands is 17 percent fake; what makes a city versus a town in England. 

Many YouTube sites are sponsored, and their makers interrupt their bits to sell you Incogni or Skillshare, but Jay and Mark make their ads just as entertaining as their regular content, so you never are tempted to fast forward through them. 

Their most recent video is from March this year and talks about the first geological map of England and the madman who created it and published it in 1799. 

ROB WATTS

There are a host of language channels on YouTube. I tend to watch them all, but Robwords is probably my favorite. Rob Watts is described by his book publisher, Penguin, as creator of “the world’s most-followed channel for the dissemination on intriguing if vaguely pointless facts about the English language.” 

Born English, he now lives in Germany and is a newsreader for Deutsche Welle, but he makes this YouTube channel about etymology, alphabets, language culture, and the odd bits of speech and print. Watts is personable, good humored without entering into stand-up territory, and well researched. 

He also takes part in a second YT channel, Words Unravelled, with an American counterpart Jess Zafarris, but I can’t bear watching it, as they are both too awfully bubbly and giddy, and Jess has an annoying vocal fry. 

I also frequently watch Taylor Jones, whose Language Jones site sometimes gets too polemical for my bland taste, and Geoff Lindsey, at drgeofflindsey, which is more academic and often quite technical. But I learn a lot. 

J.J. McCULLOUGH

McCullough was originally a political columnist, a Canadian conservative, but way too outlandish for any stateside version of that. With his towering hair and his weaving and bouncy body language, his primary concern on his videos is popular culture, of which he is a voracious consumer and thoughtful analyst. 

His videos are fast, energetically edited, with lots of quick cuts to referenced material. Occasionally, he talks about Canadian politics, which are opaque to his southern neighbors, but mostly it is American pop culture — not just movies and TV, but toys, comics, advertising, packaging, fashion, architecture and design. He has wide interests and has insightful things to say. 

Some may find his vocal delivery annoying, as he pauses and speeds up in a kind of herky-jerky speech rhythm as his head bobs to and fro. But, he is just fun to watch. 

BEKAH HARDING

A Brush with Bekah is a YouTube channel where (usually) purple-haired Bekah explores rare, historically forgotten, often toxic, sometimes radioactive pigments, and finds sources for them, and makes her own paints from them. She also discusses art history, and sometimes just has a political rant she needs to get off her chest. 

One such is titled “I Hate Picasso and You Should Too.” But most run toward “Making paint from Bugs,” “The dark history of mummy brown,” and “Science is changing the color of dinosaurs.” 

Sometimes she shows up as blond, sometimes a redhead, most often when not purple, her hair is black. And she wears punk or emo eye makeup. But she is clearly very smart, her research is thorough, and she has taught me a lot, not just about color, but more importantly, about pigment. 

MYSTERY

Whoever is behind the Moviewise site wants to remain anonymous. I can’t find him anywhere. But he produces some of the best, most insightful videos about the technical side of movies that I’ve come across. His narrative accent sounds very like that of Ernie Kovacs, but he has been cagey about where his roots are. Perhaps his family was also Hungarian? I dunno. Perhaps they just share the same adenoids. 

But if you want to see clips explaining the secrets of cinematic blocking, or expressive lighting or camera movement, he will have them to show, and take you through them almost frame by frame. 

He says, “I defend that, regardless of artistic intent or personal interpretation or cultural influence, there are objective aspects in stories and visuals that make movies succeed or fail, and by examining shots and screenplays we can find out what they are.”

I wait, champing at the bit, for each new installment. This is not a site about the great humanistic side of film history, but about how those films were constructed. 

Geoff Lindsey videos

WHAT ELSE

What any one person watches is a microscopic mote of dust in the forgotten corner of the room, compared with what is proffered. According to Wikipedia, even in 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at an inconceivable rate — 500 hours every minute, and estimates of the total number on the platform range from 15 billion to 40 billion. 

And so much of that is unwatchable — I don’t mean you can’t find them if you look, but such bad quality you can’t bring yourself to do it. Bad sound, bad editing, bad camerawork. And add into that all the political huff and chuff, and all the misinformation, all the conspiracy theories, all the fanboy rot, and cat videos, you could be excused for giving up. 

So, we rely on the newest deity, the Algorithm, to choose for us. And there are some worthy spots that leak through. These have been some for me. 

Captain Steeeve

Dan McClellan deals with biblical matters in a scholarly way, and debunks quite a bit of blather. Retired commercial pilot Steve Scheibner talks about aviation on the Captain Steeeve site (somehow, although he is 15 years younger than me, he still sounds more like my father than anyone — including the dad jokes). 

Rick Beato

Rick Beato is mainly about pop music, but has genuinely intelligent things to say about the notes and their structure, and not just, as most pop music critics do, the lyrics. Simon Whistler hosts a variety of videos on various channels. He’s more script-reader than writer, and some people are put off by what seems like a streak of careerism in him, but there is a lot to learn from the videos he hosts. 

Tom Scott

And one of the oldest continuous contributors has to be Tom Scott, who has been posting informative videos on odd topics since 2004, and on YouTube since 2014. He has a ranging curiosity, and his videos look to find answers to questions of geography, history, science, language, technology. 

He has created more than 900 videos and has 6.5 million subscribers with over 1.7 views. In 2024, he decided he was exhausted and stopped making videos, but now, he’s back again and at it once more. His genial way and genuine engagement always make him worth watching. 

I’ve mentioned a few sites that I have enjoyed. They cover things I am interested in. But there are worthy sites for other interests, whether astronomy, railroads, antiques, literature, insects, pick-a-subject. But you have to plod through the weeds to find them. 

So, perhaps we won’t rain down fire and brimstone upon YouTube, but we are still better off avoiding the dreck. 

Click any image to enlarge

Music to cry for

December 8, 2023
Uncategorized
1 Comment

Classical music critic David Hurwitz recently posted a YouTube video on works that “reduce me to a quivering puddle of emotional resonance.” He cited 10 compositions that seem to work, no matter how they are performed (although, they can be ruined by a miserable performance). 

“The crying can be sadness; it can be happiness. Usually for me it’s a confrontation with something which is so beautiful … it just seems to get to the heart of the universe and makes me weep. What can I tell you? It happens.”

He then invited his viewers to submit their own lists of works that bring on the waters. A subsequent video addressed those lists. 

Such lists usually come in round numbers: “Top Ten,” or “The Hundred Best,” etc. But when I made my own list, I realized I could go on for quite some time. 

I begin my list with the sarabande in J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 5 for unaccompanied cello. It is a ridiculously simple composition, barely more than a hundred individual notes, almost all unrelieved slow eighth-notes, but notes that plumb the deepest depths of innigkeit — that profound sense of inner subjective experience, of aloneness from the world, contemplation of things beyond words. 

The tears come, not from sadness, but from a sense of being left to your own thoughts in the darkness, the knowledge that, no matter how much you love or engage, there is always an awareness of separation. An aloneness we share with everyone else on the planet. 

I’ve heard the sarabande, and the suite, countless times, both live and on recordings. The one that always does me in is the version played by Pablo Casals in 1939. Casals was the person most responsible for the resurrection of the score, after he found a forgotten copy in a used book store in 1889, when he was 13 years old. He waited until he was 60 before recording them. There is some fuzz and hiss to the old 78rpm recordings, but the depth of Casal’s playing speaks through it all. 

The sarabande has struck many as special, even among the whole of Bach’s works. Cellist Paul Tortelier called it an “extension of silence.” Yo-Yo Ma played it on Sept. 11, 2002, at the site of the World Trade Center, while the names of the dead were spoken, on the first anniversary of the attack. 

Second on my list is the final chorus of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder, which expresses grief over the death of Jesus on the cross. That chorus transcends religious doctrine so that I, as a non-believer, can internalize the sense of loss, of death, and grieve along with them. “We sit down in tears,” they sing, with a section that also asks for “peace, sweet peace.” 

I first head the chorus as film-score music for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Neorealist retelling of The Gospel According to St. Matthew, a dour black-and-white version, almost word for word from the Bible (and how peculiar that the most successful Christian film should come from a homosexual Communist atheist, but with reverence for the humanity of the story; no Cecil B. DeMille hokum and claptrap for this one). 

Grieving is one cause for the waterworks in listeners. How can you not feel the intense sadness of Dido as she faces her own death in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, in the section known as Dido’s Lament, “When I am Laid to Rest.” It is a ground bass (repeated bass line), over which she sings “Remember me … remember me.” It is heartbreaking. 

Alban Berg used his entire Violin Concerto to express mourning over the death of Manon Gropius, daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, who died of polio in 1935 at the age of 18. Berg dedicated his concerto “To the memory of an angel.” 

It begins quietly on the violin’s open strings, builds to an angry climax, and reaches a point of cosmic acceptance with a quote of J.S. Bach’s chorale, “Es ist Genug” (“It is enough.”) 

After all the turbulence of the anger, the simple hymn, albeit harmonized in a very 20th-century way, seems like the peace of the angels, a calm in the universe. I, for one, cannot listen to the concerto without tears streaming down my cheeks. 

Although it is written in his idiosyncratic 12-tone style, the Berg Violin Concerto is never simply noise: Even those who hate modern serial music love this concerto. It is music, not theory. 

These several pieces work because, while they are expressing their grief over a specific death, they also subsume the rest of us. And there is music which expresses not individual grief, but Weltschmerz — “the sorrows of the world” — that sense that all lives have an end, that life is suffering, that “no one gets out alive.” 

The work that seems to hit everyone in the gut with this is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Originally the slow movement of a string quartet, Barber orchestrated it to create the version known best. 

The music is simple, barely more complex than a Gregorian chant, but builds slowly to an overwhelming climax, then silence, then a short peroration of calmness and repose. Never a dry eye. 

The only problem with the Adagio for Strings is that it has become so popular, played at the funerals of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Albert Einstein, and Barber himself. It has become de rigeur for public tragedies such as Sept. 11, The Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2016 Brussels bombing and the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, and in 2020 for the victims of the Coronavirus. To say nothing of how many movies it provides a trigger for emotions, as in Platoon, The Elephant Man and Lorenzo’s Oil. So that, for some, it can no longer be heard innocently, but only with irony, as in its appearance in Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and South Park. 

But so far, the Adagio has proved bulletproof. It always works. Emotions pour out. The music is powerful.

And talk about Weltschmerz: Another concerto brings out the emotions almost instantly, and that is Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Unlike most classical music concertos, it opens with the solo cello playing widely spaced E-minor chords, ringing sad and hollow, followed by a short cadenza before the orchestra ever plays a note. 

Elgar wrote it in 1919 in distress over the death and destruction of the First World War. It is a musical evocation of the famous lament of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” It is hard, with our distance from the events, and after the Second World War and the horrors of the Cold War, to fathom what a psychological wrench that first cataclysm was for the world, and how much it was clear that everything anyone knew had changed utterly and forever. So much was lost. Elgar’s concerto puts that sentiment into music. 

That sense of loss is personal as well as civic, and you sense it in the greatest of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs, “Im Abendrot.” It is a song for soprano and orchestra that conveys such a sense of longing and loss that even without the words, the orchestra alone can bring out the tears. 

In it an old couple stands on a hill looking at a sunset, a lark flies off into the twilight and the words by German poet Joseph von Eichendorff, say, “Wie sind wir wandermüde — Is dies etwa der Tod?” “How weary we are of wandering — Is this perhaps death?” 

There is something of the same feeling (and similar orchestral lushness) in Gustav Mahler’s Der Abschied, the final song of the cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, “The Song of the Earth.” The half-hour song tells of the beauty and permanence of nature and in the brevity of the human life. Even for a Mahler nut like me, who loves pretty much everything the man put on paper, Der Abschied is the single most beautiful and heartbreaking thing that composer ever wrote. 

“O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens – Lebens – trunk’ne Welt!” “O beauty! O eternal loving-and-life-drunk world!” And the voice finally shrinks down to near-silence repeating the word “Ewig,” “forever…” over and over until it and the orchestra dissolve in emptiness. 

Mahler himself asked whether the music should even be played. “Won’t people go home and shoot themselves?” he asked. The thing is that the highest art may tell the most dismal tale, yet the beauty of the telling is life-enriching and leaves us weeping but full of joy. 

Mahler gave us also a song of such inwardness and reflection in the Rückert Lieder, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” a setting of a poem by Friedrich Ruckert. “I am become lost to the world, with which I used to waste so much time. It has for known nothing of me for so long, it may well believe me dead.” The slow tread of the song, with its repeated incomplete upward motive, leaves you floating between earth and sky. 

That Mahler song may not be the deepest expression of giving up on life. That honor has to fall to the final song in Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, “Winter Journey.” The cycle of 24 songs by German poet Wilhelm Müller collectively tell the story of a romantic young man spurned in love, who travels in suffering through a winter landscape, telling of loneliness, heartsickness, futility, fate, and finally, in Die Leiermann, “The hurdy-gurdy man,” finds an image of utter hopelessness. 

“Barefoot on the ice, he sways to and fro, and his little collection plate remains empty. No one wants to listen to him; no one looks at him. … He plays and his hurdy-gurdy never stops.” The piano accompaniment repeats the same figure over and over, with no sense of forward motion, and the singer sings his words over and over with little variation. This is psychological depression at its peak expression. “Strange old man, shall I go with you?” The implication is that the Leiermann is simply Death itself. 

 But I may be giving the wrong impression. While music of woe may bring on the deepest emotion, so, too, can music of joy and beauty. There is a reason people cry at weddings. When any emotion, from grief to ecstasy, fills the interior space, it can swell and overflow, and the overflow valves in the human being are the eyes. The emotional pressure in the body swells until it cannot be held in check. Tears of joy, tears in the face of beauty. 

I remember the words that playwright Peter Shaffer put in the mouth of Antonio Salieri in his play, Amadeus. Salieri overheard the adagio of Mozart’s Gran Partita for winds. 

“Extraordinary!,” he says. “On the page it looked nothing! The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons, basset horns — like a rusty squeezebox. And then, suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”

It is an astonishing thing about beauty, real beauty, that it can sit beside the horrors of the world, the miseries, the deaths, the wars, the hatreds and injustices, and make you pause, fill you with emotions and remind you that no matter how bad things are, you still cling to life. The beauty can not excuse the suffering, but in some inexplainable way can somehow balance it. Beauty can stop time and fill you up to overflowing. 

Shostakovich wrote his 13th symphony, setting the Yevtushenko poem, Babi Yar, about the 1941 massacre of more than 30,000 Jews by Nazis at Babi Yar, near Kiev. It is a powerful poem denouncing anti-Semitism and the horrors of war and hatred (and a warning about Soviet anti-Semitism). The following movements of this choral symphony take on bitter humor as antidote to bureaucracy and tyranny; the hunger of food shortage; the use of fear by totalitarians; and finally, the difference between amoral careerism and the need for artists to express truth. 

This finale is introduced by a flute duet of such sweet delight, such soothing calmness, that although it cannot gainsay the horrors, it somehow balances them. The music itself, while beautiful, is nothing special in itself, but coming as it does at the end of this explosion of the miseries of the world (and especially Stalin’s Soviet Union), is such an unexpected release, it seems a miracle, and with the pressure taken off, at least momentarily, it can only be felt and expressed by its audience in the immediate explosion of waterworks. 

Now, all I have to hear is the flute bit, and I instantly recall all that went before, and I weep uncontrollably. 

That sense of beauty as counterbalance is the overwhelming sense you can get from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which gives us 15 to 20 minutes (depending on performance) of stillness in the universe, a slow pulse that seems more cosmic than corporeal. It comes after a terrifying first movement and a relentless scherzo. The world then, after flowing through turbulent rapids, empties out into the calm ocean of the adagio. The release is overwhelming. 

It is also the slow motion of the finale of Mahler’s Third Symphony, which, after earlier movements titled “What the flowers in the meadow tell me,” “What the animals in the forest tell me,” What Man tells me,” and “What the angels tell me,” ends his symphony with a half-hour movement, “What Love tells me.” 

It is marked “Langsam — Ruhevoll — Empfunden,” (Slowly — Peacefully — Deeply felt,” and moves at a slow tread, first in the strings and building, a half-hour later, with trombones and brass and a final chord that can last to eternity. Conductor Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler and conducted the premieres of both his Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, said of this movement, “Words are stilled — for what language can utter heavenly love more powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its broad, solemn melodic line, is, as a whole — and despite passages of burning pain — eloquent of comfort and grace.”

The Swiss critic William Ritter said it was, ”Perhaps the greatest Adagio written since Beethoven.” Another anonymous critic wrote about the Adagio: “It rises to heights which situate this movement among the most sublime in all symphonic literature.” At its premier in 1902, Mahler was called back to the podium 12 times, and the local newspaper reported that “the thunderous ovation lasted no less than 15 minutes.”

That sense of time standing still reaches a much quieter apotheosis in the slow movement of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. With subtle cross-rhythms and a melody that seldom rises above a mezzo-piano, it is entirely hypnotic. The beauty of it brings me to tears almost even just thinking of it. 

And there is the sublime beauty of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, a choral work that lasts a mere four minutes in just 46 bars of sighing chromaticism and sotto voce music, and, as one critic put it, is “capable of leaving the listener just as moved as might an entire five-day long cycle of Wagner’s Ring.” 

Some of these may work their magic only on my ears, some seem to work for everyone. And there are times when the listener may be too tired, to caught up in other things, or a bad meal or just in a sour mood, when such music can pass by almost unnoticed. And there are times in a concert when I am so tuned in, that almost any music, played well, may bring on the waterworks. 

But for me, this music almost never fails. The music triggers some empathetic response, and the emotions shiver to life. I am human; these are human feelings; these emotions are what make us human. 

Music can do that better, and more immediately, than any other art.