The Death of the Death of Classical Music

Most recently the idea of "erasure" came to me when I took a mental-health afternoon on Tuesday and found some solace out at Fairmount Park, where the horses race on the Illinois side of the river.

I had a great time. Came out ahead, but the good fortune had little to do with the lucre in my pocket. I love going to the racetrack because it is one of the few places where you can be around all sorts of people - from the guy who is checking the tickets dropped on the ground in search of a winner discarded by mistake to the guy with diamonds in his ears; from the young Latinos arguing the qualities of the ocho horse in the fifth race to ladies sipping their Long Island ice tea as they make their plans for the daily double. Children run around freely and sometimes get to pet the ponies -- those horses that trot alongside the race horses, calming them, on the way to the starting gate. You see rumpled old guys in T-shirts that read "Ruggedly Handsome." You see lots of happy people taking the afternoon off on "Play Hooky Tuesday." You see lots of pretty horses. You make foolish bets. You make soundly reasoned bets. You win or lose however you play them. You hear "I would have won a thousand dollars if I hadn't listened to you. I should slap you alongside the head!" And you hear everybody laugh about it.

But as I walked away sweetly satisfied from Fairmount the other day, I suddenly was gripped by sadness. One of these days, I suspect, Fairmount Park won't be around anymore. More people are lured by the glitter and dazzle and razzmatazz of gambling boats than the slow pace of a day at the races. It's a shame, maybe even a crying shame, but horse racing is a costly enterprise and it's hard for race tracks - especially those on the modest scale of Fairmount -- to compete for the gambling dollars against the va-va-va-voom of casinos. "Everything dies, baby that's a fact," Springsteen sings.

"And maybe everything that dies someday comes back," he goes on. You lose a farm. You lose a race track. You lose your favorite coffee cup. You lose a spouse. You lose a cat. You lose some teeth. You lose the bagel shop. You lose the Arena. You lose Sportsman's Park. You lose old Busch. You lose the memories of what you've lost. That's life.

Maybe it is a part of my growing older, but even though the poet Elizabeth Bishop said, "the art of losing isn't hard to master," it's not easy either, especially as the erasure of things seems to be moving at a more precipitate pace. I can hardly remember the building that stood at the corner of Grand and Lindell not all that many years ago. I do remember Basically Bagels, which used to be the bagel Mecca in the Central West End, on the corner of Pine and Euclid. I remember the Arena, the "Old Barn," imploded along with the memories of Blues games and when Dylan and the Band played there. Dylan also played the Muny, and Nureyev dance there, where only summer musicals now play to family audiences. I typed my master's thesis on an Olivetti typewriter. I hardly ever write, or receive, a letter anymore.

"What thou lovest well, remains." I've quoted Pound a few times in the writing of this daily blog, probably because I work promoting an art form that is perpetually under a death sentence.

I may not live where I can hear the Great Northern train whistle moan across the waters of Lake Pend Oreille anymore, but "I hear it," as Yeats' said, "in the deep heart's core" -- that is, where you love things well.

I do live where I can hear Thomas Adès and Beethoven side by side, for nothing freshens a 19th-century monument more (and makes it less monumental and more a living work of art) than being paired with the new. One doesn't blow the other away. Beethoven's beauties remain even as Adès' provoke a rowdy discourse with them.

We can't go on. We go on. I call this post "The Death of the Death of Classical Music" because anything that's been pronounced dead as often as classical music needs to move on to another subject. Classical music is not like a dying race track, or an old sports arena, or a typewriter. It is real estate open to re-invention.

The more perilous notion is what remains of the Adès/Beethoven colloquy after the last shout of joy has ended and the audience dissolves into the normality of the car and the drive home and the cell phone and the news and the last check of the email. Are the intense pressures of time present and time future so voracious, so greedy, that the space for the past is getting used up in our minds like the former pasture lands and forests that have given way to housing developments and shopping centers? Where is the space for the farm, the Great Northern Railroad, the Olivetti typewriter, or Isabel Leonard singing Mozart when erasure is the dominant gesture of the hyperkinetic world?