---

Classical

---

In the 23 years I''ve been teaching music history for Monterey Peninsula College, I have always aspired to replace fancy with fact, to demystify the experience of listening to music.

Does this effort rob music of its mystery? Not at all. Many published observers are pleased to wax poetic about music, laying overwrought personal metaphors on top of music itself, blurring its integrity and distracting attention from its real riches.

Almost without exception, when I ask my students to describe the music we have just heard, they begin with their reaction to it, in subjective terms ("flowing," "soothing," or some imagined visual image). I insist that we start over, and guide them into the vocabulary of music itself (melody, rhythm, harmony, instrumentation, etc.)

Not only does this approach exchange a subjective frame of mind with an objective one, but it sharpens the listener''s ears and mind. Now, the students are ready to hear the same thing again, alert to its musical events, and reinforced in their genuine powers of observation.

Do I expect them to know what the composer is doing? Yes, up to a point. After all, the composer had to tend to all these matters in order for the piece to exist at all. Do I hold their feet to the fire of unfamiliar music, or music they claim to dislike on first hearing? Yes, up to a point.

Yet, like those who would encrust the experience of listening to music with an overlay of mysticism, most of my students seem happiest when listening to a "favorite" piece they''ve heard many times before. Therefore, to be successful, I must use wile and wit to seduce the recalcitrant ear, to eliminate the fear, to sweeten the unfamiliar.

I love the interaction and repartee of each Saturday morning''s class at Carmel Foundation (part of MPC''s Older Adult program). But the process at times does remind me of St. Anthony''s sermon to the fishes, retold so cleverly in the old German folk poem (and so splendidly set to music by Mahler).

Man''s still uncovered, and church is deserted,

So Anthony preaches instead to the fishes,

And swift they come swimming, in sunshine a''gleaming.

The carp in their dozens bring brothers and cousins;

With wide mouths a-glisten, they all start to listen.

No sermon so pleasant they heard till the present.

The pike among others, who fight all their brothers,

Come tumbling and turning to hear so much learning.

The cod, high and mighty, who think the rest flighty

And hate interference, put in an appearance.

No sermon so pleasant they heard till the present.

And eels so well able to grace a fine table,

The rich man to nourish, swim up with a flourish.

The crabs, the slow-coaches, with sidelong approaches

For once hasten near, the preacher to hear.

No sermon so pleasant they heard till the present.

But when it is finished, their zeal diminished

The pike fall to preying, the eels to their playing;

They listened with pleasure, forgetting at leisure.

The crabs still go backward, the cod''s fat and awkward,

The carp''s still a glutton, and sermon forgotten, forgotten.

For all his endeavor, they''re sinful as ever,

They''re sinful as ever, as ever.

---

classical calendar

---

Ensemble Monterey

Friday/Saturday, 8pm. John Anderson conducts young Mozart. Friday: National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main, Salinas; Saturday: Church of Religious Science, 400 W. Franklin, Monterey. 372-4523.