The Fry Side

Last night, I took my son to a concert. It was an orchestra playing the full suite of The Planets by Gustav Holst. Before each planet, a science teacher stood behind a corner podium and gave a musical and scientific introduction, and each performance had a slideshow of images for each celestial body. Austin has been studying astronomy in school, so for this night The Planets were aligned.

[HA!]

It had been quite some time since I last listened to the full suite. Sitting and listening to them ten years later has given me far more perspective on just how massive this work of Holst’s is.

I remember being bored by Venus and Saturn. But especially with the introduction to Saturn as the dignity in aging and death, the way that movement ended was simple and spectacular. And Neptune works as the great anti-finale. It leaves you adrift, wondering what could be beyond it, knowing full well that there has to be something.

It is something significant about who we are that changes what we hear in and get out of music throughout our lives. The speaker mentioned that Saturn was Holst’s favorite of the suite, and now I can understand why.

There was also something else to the music. It has been a long time since I attended a concert that I was not actively either playing in or working on. So I sat and got to just absorb this art laid out over time.

Music is the only art that requires time in order to actually exist. It is the closest thing we have to a tangible fourth dimension. Anything else can be looked at again, gone back over, re-read, etc. Even plays can be read without being acted and the impact of the art is nearly there.

With music, as any of us who know how to actually read its nomenclature can attest, until it happens, it sits as a potential. No art or impact is conveyed without hearing it, and it can only be heard as part of its own sequence.

So I sat in the audience and just listened. There was nothing else going on. I wasn’t working on something else, I was there just for the music and I got to hear so much more of it. It wasn’t a background to the movie of life. So much great art is thrown to the dogs of daily life without being appreciated.