Teaching in Gangsta's Paradise

Today in my creative writing class, students wrote essays about songs they brought in, discussing both the meaning and the writing of the lyrics.  This is my own take on the assignment.



Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise moves me, precisely because I am the person the song is written to.  I am that teacher, that intellectual, that political activist, that, well, white person who once thought it was easy to solve the world's problems.  Education is the answer, right?

"They say I gotta learn, but nobody's here to teach me / If they can't understand it, how can they reach me?"  Coolio's question towards the end of the song is, to me, the crux of his narrative.  Having described life in the gang world – the complex mixture of pride, self-loathing, competition, fear, and brotherhood that comes with the kind of upbringing most eventual gangsters find impossible to escape – Coolio responds to my righteous indignation.  He needs to get an education, I say.  His response: you don't get it.  He's right, I don't.  And, what's more, I'm far from alone.

It's easy to take the next two lines as resignation: "I guess they can't; I guess they won't / I guess they front; that's why I know my life is outta luck, fool!"  I would argue, however, that there's something else going on here.  Indeed, this isn't resignation, but rather frustration and anger at the resignation of those few who are willing to try to teach the otherwise disenfranchised, the gangsters, the "dangerous." The problem is, that effort to teach is usually an effort to conquer, to impose, to "reform."  "They can't" and "They won't" because they're afraid to try to understand a life that asks "I'm twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?" without irony or sarcasm.

What would it mean to be a teacher in a Gangsta's Paradise?  There are plenty of teachers there, already.  There are the ineffectual schoolteachers, who lament their students' stupidity, disobedience, and laziness, and then there are the brothers and fathers and uncles who teach their kids how to survive on the street, who have a more nuanced view of those students' flaws.  Regardless, there's not much communication across those boundaries.  The innocent outsider, there to solve the problem, is afraid to actually understand and experience the problem he or she wants to solve.  The insider has more important things to worry about that than 19^th century European History or Trigonometry.

I don't have solutions, myself.  Even as a former teacher of at-risk and high-risk teens in Hawaii, some of whom were well-versed in the gang lifestyle, if only by proxy, there's no magic bullet to becoming a cultural insider.  Taking away the expectation that teaching is about distributing knowledge is a start.  Eliminating the distinction between teacher and learner is another step.  But even the most radical and progressive pedagogy is no guarantee.  Because, at the end of the day, you can't "front."  You can't bullshit.  And that's really hard for teachers to do.

Gangsta's Paradise is a brilliant, well-written song because it's not afraid to address the complexity, to challenge the assumption that access to knowledge and education makes all the difference.  Beyond that, though, it's reflective, recognizing that the Paradise of the L.A. (or New York, or Honolulu) gang world has its own responsibility: "Tell my why are we, so blind to see / That the ones we hurt, are you and me."  That does not absolve me, or those millions who are afraid to even acknowledge the issue, of responsibility.  Rather, it only further illustrates how important it is not to be a conqueror, not to fight gang culture, or to try to "enlighten" the people caught in it.  The process is subtler than that, and more risky.  I should say, the process is subtler than that on the ground.

Higher up, the problem is starker, and very much analogous to the gang experience: "Power and the money, money and the power / minute after minute, hour after hour / Everybody's runnin, but half of them ain't lookin' / What's going on in the kitchen, but I don't know what's cookin."  This could just as easily be about politicians, corporate leaders, banks, insurance companies as about gangsters themselves.  What better example of the brilliance of the lyric writing could you find than this?  The audience expands; we learn that we're all living in the same Gangsta's Paradise, where the ones we hurt are, far too often, you and me.

Gangsta's Paradise moves me, however, not because I can empathize.  The analogy between the gang world and the commercial and corporate world may be apt, but it doesn't mean the experience is the same.  No, what is moving is the challenge to my perceptions, the self-awareness and fear of the author, and, in spite of it all, the pride.  I don't get it, but I do respect it, and that's a start.

Sacris Solemnis

Not long ago I heard a fascinating rendition of the second movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony on the radio.  If you're not familiar with the original, here's a passable version from Youtube:



Obviously it's an intense piece, and very intricately constructed.  It's in A-Minor (the 7th Symphony as a whole is in A-Major), and it heavily relies upon the tonic to dominant and back movement that starts the piece.  More than the harmony, however, what makes this piece so effective is its rhythm.  The whole 7th Symphony feels like dance,* from the celebratory and springy first movement to the hectic races of the 3rd and 4th movements, dance rhythms are pervasive.  This movement is no different, and while it is certainly sedate and may even come across - especially on first listening - as profoundly sad, if it is a lamentation it's a dancing one.  The repeated rhythmic meme of One-Two-and-Three-Four gives it a measured, dancing feel, a driving force that pushes the movement onward.


* Indeed, Wagner called it "the apotheosis of the dance."

I could go on about the 7th Symphony, but that's not my object.  Rather, I want to introduce the fascinating rendition I heard on the radio.  Give it a listen:



Now some classical music people are not fond of this kind of pirating of a famous piece.  I, however, think that's a bit stuffy and closed-minded.  Beethoven would maybe be offended by a re-rendition of his work, but, then again, he also re-rendered some of Mozart's themes in his own variations.  If nothing else, Beethoven would appreciate the choice of lyrics Libera leader Robert Prizeman elected to set against Beethoven's work.

You see, the 2nd Movement of the 7th Symphony is easy to understand as a dour, overwhelmingly depressing display of emotion.  I don't believe, however, that such was Beethoven's intent.  Indeed, this movement strikes me as just as joyful as the remainder of the symphony.  If anything, the difference is that this movement is more reverential - or at least reverential in a different way.  Where the other movements are like whirling dervishes, showing their devotion to life, love, and happiness by swinging about wildly, this movement is a wiser, quieter, more intense and personal display.

What perhaps the Libera version loses most is the build-up.  Beethoven's version starts with just chords, and piece by piece introduces further harmonies and a wonderful contrapuntal (and highly chromatic) melody.  He then moves that melody up through the instruments until it reaches the violins, singing above the rest of the orchestra's pounding harmonic and rhythmic core.  Libera can't and doesn't try to recreate that effect, choosing rather to focus on the simple interplay of melody and harmony that a novice might lose sight of in Beethoven's work.

Adding in a percussion part and an original "bridge" in the middle of the piece only further brings out the power of Beethoven's harmonies and rhythms.  The added bits feel, to me anyway, very natural, especially because they are so-well situated in the piece.  They help the listener forget that the Beethoven original contains more themes and development that would be unwieldy - if not downright ugly - performed by voice.  Those orchestral developments become unnecessary against the dynamic crescendo employed by Prizeman in his rendition.

But the lyrics.  This is what fascinates me most.  Prizeman chooses a hymn - Sacris Solemnis - as his text.  Now, Beethoven is ironically famous for introducing lyrics to orchestral music in his 9th Symphony, but the recognition of Beethoven as an innovator for the voice comes despite his disinterest in writing for the voice throughout his life as a composer.  In a time when opera was still very much the rage, Beethoven composed one, better-known for its preludes and overtures than its arias.  It seems to me that Beethoven was concerned, generally, with matters to weighty for lyrics.  Or, rather, his work was always singing in a language more expressive than German or Latin or Italian already, so why spoil it with words?  In some sense, his 9th Symphony seems to me to be an effort to teach we listeners his language of joy, present throughout his musical oeuvre.

So what lyrics did Prizeman select for his setting of the 7th Symphony?  The Latin goes like this:*

Sacris solemnis, Juncta sint gaudia
Corda, et voces, et opera.
Recedant vitera, nova sint omnia.
Sacris solemnis, gaudia.
Te trina Deitas unique Poscimus:
Sacris solemnis, gaudia.

* The bridge is: "Lucem, lucem ad inhabitas," which translates as "The light wherein You dwell."

I'm no Latin scholar, so I have to rely on the translations of others and a little bit of guesswork, but roughly this means something like:

At this our solemn feast, let holy joys abound
In every heart, and voice, and act.
Let ancient rites depart,* and all be new around.
At this our solemn feast, let there be joy.
We implore Thee, God, the Trinity:
At this our solemn feast, let there be joy.

* Reminds me of the opening lyrics of the 9th: "Oh fruende, nicht diese tone."

Even if the translation isn't perfect, could there be a better set of lyrics?  They capture the solemnity and reverence of the piece, but also understand that the occasion is fundamentally a joyful one.

I think, with Beethoven in particular, but also with Chopin and Wagner and a great many other composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, it's easy to get lost in the emotional force of the music.  The Romantic era, in particular, earns its name for its desirous, pining melodies and its adventures far from the tonic, through streams of dominants, making us positively lust after some resolution.  But, even though we might call such music childish - or, worse, adolescent - it is not.  I believe it cheapens those musicians to call their music "angry" or "sad" when, in reality, the story is much more complicated than that, the emotional investment much more nuanced.

Beethoven's music is joyful, not because he was always joyful, but because the act of writing music was, to him, a divine one, and one which brought him joy.  Even his most tempestuous works have a streak of the kind of melancholic joy that comes with understanding one's sadness and frustration to be only a part - and a vital one - of the emotional canvass of a joyful life.  I would argue that Chopin's "sad" music, for example, may come from the heart of a depressed invalid, but that depressed invalid was truly joyful in his heart when he composed music.

The 7th Symphony - and in particular the 2nd movement - is more, however, than just melancholy written with joy, but expressing melancholy.  No, it's exactly how Prizeman describes, a solemn plea and prayer for joy.  That may seem paradoxical, but I don't think it has to be.  I think joy and solemnity often exist side-by-side, and, what's more, that joy is sometimes its most poignant in a minor key.   Listen again and see if you can hear it.

Towards Defining Great Music, Part Five: Nicht Diese Tone

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is, of course, one of the most famous pieces of music ever recorded. Who hasn't heard the "Ode to Joy?" Which young piano student doesn't learn the melody?

Of the many reasons for the fame of the Ninth Symphony, however, the most curious is the presence of a choir. Not only was this a new addition to the symphonic style, it was also new to Beethoven. In a time when opera was the rage - and in the shadow of the master of opera, Mozart - Beethoven curiously composed only one opera (which was not successful) and a spattering of songs. In short, lyrics were not his forte, and composing for the human voice was essentially unknown to him. How odd, then, that his perhaps best known melody (up there with the opening of the 5th Symphony) is one of the very few he wrote for the voice.

Why did Beethoven compose so little music for the voice? Why is the Ninth Symphony, on the contrary, the Chorale Symphony? Those questions hardly seem to address the problem I've been dancing around for the last month, but I believe they are actually at the heart of the question. Great Music ought, I believe, to speak for itself, and no composer is as systematic in his rejection of lyric - in, we might say, his elevation of pure, instrumental music - as Beethoven. His symphonies and sonatas claim that they are comprehensible to the musical mind without the attendant translation of singers and words. Their purpose, indeed, might be inexpressible except through music alone.

If any music is great, then, to my mind, this is a key ingredient: it must be the music which is great. Music with lyric may very well be great, but by removing the lyrics, we can find music pure, and see whether greatness is even possible. Indeed, the question, "Is there Great music?" should be reconstituted thus: "Is there music which speaks for itself, and which expresses something words cannot." Perhaps all music does that, perhaps only some. But Great music would almost certainly do it and do it well, expressing not "I'm extremely sad in a way words cannot express," but revealing, instead, we might say, what the non-linguistic root of sadness is. What, indeed, the spiritual, emotional, mythical, or animal root might be.

Because we are moving - by necessity - into the realm of pure music, words will almost certainly fail us soon. Nevertheless, let us push on a little further, so we can see what lies at the borderlands between language and music, and see whether that further realm is fallow or fertile.

So let's start with a piece. The Kreutzer Sonata. Not quite "early" Beethoven (whose music is notoriously similar to that of his mentor Haydn), but still fairly early in his life. The first movement, which I have linked to above, is a stunning adventure through what sounds, more than anything, like the frustrations of tremendous romantic desire. And yet also it could be a lover's quarrel. Either way, it is violent and intense, raging from major to minor and back again, displaying a dizzying give and take between the piano and violin that is not quite cooperative, but is not quite confrontational either.

I must confess that my interpretation of this piece is colored by two sources. Tolstoy wrote a short story called "The Kreutzer Sonata" about this very piece, and it is a dark and disturbing work about jealousy and violence in love. In addition, the movie "Immortal Beloved" places this piece centrally in its narrative, claiming that it is the result of a frustrated Beethoven when his carriage gets stuck in the mud, causing him to miss his rendezvous with his beloved.

Neither of those specific images, however, really captures the meaning of the piece, as I understand it. Rather, exactly what makes the Kreutzer great is that it can accurately be conveyed by two such disparate physical situations. Why can it do that? Because it is not limited by any words you can apply to it. The spiritual and emotional processes behind it - the feelings that it reveals to us - are expressible most completely exactly by sonata, and that same feeling can be traced to both Tolstoy's story and the movie.

I won't go into depth on the Kreutzer now - rather, I want to save for future posts exploration of Beethoven's works - so instead I can point out a couple other words that I find comparably profound, as further argument for Great Music.

Consider the Spring sonata as well.* While not as intense as the Kreutzer, the Spring is one of, I think, Beethoven's most intensely romantic works. Unlike much of his "romantic" music, the Spring is not rife with conflict or frustration, capturing instead the lighter and more playful side of love (the "Spring" side, if you will). I point to it as a contrast to the Kreutzer, and because it is also a violin sonata. It is worth finding violin sonatas by other composers and comparing them to Beethoven. No other composer comes close to his mastery of the interaction between violin and piano, if only because he is not afraid to understand the instruments as lover and beloved, rather than merely as instruments. Beethoven's violin sonatas have a built-in sexual tension that is unmatched elsewhere.

* In all four movements.

I've linked to this before, but here's Beethoven's Appassionata sonata in an excellent performance. This, like the Kreutzer, is an intense and almost violent work. Its title is telling, but "passionate" doesn't really explain the nature of the passion on display. And yet, listening to the appassionata, one cannot help but "get it" without really being able to say what it "gotten."

There are other pieces I could mention, but I want to jump forward to the 9th Symphony, since I think I've paved the way for my ultimate point.* What is fascinating about the 9th Symphony - as I mentioned at the outset - is that Beethoven puts a choir in the final movement. It's more than worth listening to the entire thing on the way to that choir, of course, because of how they make their entrance: "O Fruende, Nicht Diese Tone..."

* Karajan conducting.

"Oh friends, not these tones. Let us sing yet more joyfully." Beethoven wrote the opening to the choir's lines, and then borrowed the remainder from Schiller. Legend has it that he anguished over those opening lines, unsure whether to introduce Schiller's "Ode to Joy" by name, or to signal instead some of the key themes of the text to follow. He settled, instead, on looking back, "Not these tones." The 9th Symphony is in D minor, until this moment, at which point it switches to D Major.

What is important to remember, however, is that the choir does not sing right away in the final movement. Instead, the orchestra by themselves play exactly what the choir is about to sing. The meaning is already there, the choir is just there for clarification. Indeed, Beethoven is cautioning the listener not to take too seriously the lyrics, or at least to be a little critical of the deeper meaning. Which words does he, in the end, emphasize? Which sections are presented with some musical sarcasm? Humor? Sincerity?

I'll return to the 9th Symphony at some point - possibly in a recapitulation of my senior thesis at St. John's - but for now I want to point to this: Beethoven creates a whole realm of spiritual meaning in the body of his work, meaning that would be diminished by lyric. When he finally did incorporate lyrics into his music, in his final symphony, it was done with slyness and humor.

Perhaps that doesn't answer any of our questions about Great Music. For my part, I'm not sure there is a conclusive argument to be made about music, if only because we each have such different experiences. Nevertheless, there is a reason that musicologists and theorists study Beethoven and Mozart and Wagner (and even some non-Germans) so closely. Their music, if you can unlock your ear, speaks a language divine. Perhaps music of any genre can do that, but I wonder whether the complexity of the harmony in what is broadly called "classical" music isn't actually an essential part of that language, a part we too often leave out nowadays.

Either way, there is a modern conception that Beethoven and his ilk - those long-dead white men - wrote music that is boring. That is a terrible mistake. Whether you accept any of my premises, trust me on this: all of those stereotypes that we associate with classical music - old foagies sitting around listening to boring, fluffy violins while they smoke their pipes - are not true. Beethoven has more to do with what you listen to today than you think, and if that does not make his music great, it at the very least makes it important.

Towards Defining Great Music, Part Four: Modern Music

I heard there was a secret chord,
That David played, and it pleased the Lord,
But you don't really care for music, do you?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,
The minor fall and the major lift,
The baffled king composing Hallelujah.

Popular music throughout history has found itself both indebted to and in conflict with so-called "art music." There was a time when the conflict was essentially religious; popular music was vulgar, meaningless, and the work of peasants while art music was composed almost exclusively for the church. Gregorian chant fits this model, of course, but much of the medieval polyphony that followed was likewise devotional. Giovanni Perluigi de Palestrina was probably the most prolific and famous composer of his time, and it is no accident that he was also deeply religious.

It is not my intention to trace the history of popular music, as such, but rather to point out that art music and popular music have always shared a reciprocal relationship. Though the more deliberate forms that make up symphonies and operas have always had a kind of aristocratic preference over the more streetwise popular forms of every era, innovations in either one almost always became innovations in the other. Over time, as the distance between art music and popular music has decreased, those innovations have been shared more and more readily. But even during the classical and romantic eras, folk melodies became the rage, and the eerie dissonances heard on the streets and in brothels began to make their way into the music of Brahms, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and especially Dvorák.

It is impossible to discuss modern popular music (and modern art music) without confronting jazz. Though it has been waning in popularity since, frankly, the 50s, jazz is perhaps the single most influential genre in the history of Western music. Though of course it is based upon European harmonies, it transformed the formal and rhythmic essences that those very harmonies had always existed in, and therefore also began to transform the harmonies themselves. As a result, even recent composers of art music - such as Bernstein, Copland, and Gershwin - have written a kind of "classical jazz," extracting the solo, but leaving the remainder of jazz form, harmony, and rhythm.

Modern art music, however, is even more marginalized than jazz, occupying a small niche among musicologists and the "pretentious for the sake of pretension" crowd that makes up our modern aristocracies (though we tend to prefer gentry, or "upwardly mobile"). I could say much about some of the better modern composers, like John Tavener or Arvo Part, but they don't really constitute what I mean by modern music. Judgment as to the greatness of their music will not come any time soon.

Modern popular music, on the other hand, is an interesting case. My object here - as I spiral towards (or away from) a definition of great music - is to consider whether popular music can be great. Because that question is unanswerable, I fear, for the time being, I expect rather to address what the purpose and effect of modern music is, and whether that seems to befit greatness.

The quotation with which this posts begins comes from a piece you have probably heard in many versions. Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah may not be the most harmonically complex piece of music ever, but to me it captures the essence of what modern music is. There are many songs we could look at, of course, but Hallelujah straddles them all: it is about music, it is a love song (like so much modern, and indeed historical, music), it has a simple and repetitive harmonic structure, it has lyrics which are probably as important as the song itself, and it is immensely popular. The first of these qualities should not be overlooked. It is always informative to look at music which is about music itself when trying to understand the work of an era.

Cohen calls attention, from the beginning of his piece, to the simple harmony he's using. "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth." Those words could be in just about any modern song, and in many that would cover the entirety of the harmonic variation. In Cohen, however, there are a couple wrinkles. Hallelujah fluctuates continuously between C Major and A minor, keys which share the same scale, but which have very different harmonic qualities. His "fourth" and "fifth" indicate that the piece is in C, ultimately, but the minor twinge is unavoidable. What's more, besides the four, five, and six ("the minor fall," which is also A), there is a guest appearance from E minor, the three. In classical music this would not happen without a modulation as well, but here it works because E is the dominant of A, meaning that the presence of the E minor - though it is minor and not the expected Major - reinforces the sense that either C or A could be the tonic.

Ok, harmonic hand-wringing aside, Hallelujah is much more complex than most modern, popular music, but not be a lot. The form repeats itself over and over, and what variation occurs in the melody or harmony is the work of the individual performer, and not the intent of the piece. Nevertheless, the harmonic "trick" here is to inspire a kind of restless wandering in the listener's ear. Is it Major? Minor? How ought I to feel, when listening to this piece? Of course, the lyrics reinforce that confusion, answering with a resounding "both." Hallelujah is desperately joyful, but defeated. Its title and lyrics are not ironic so much as reflective. Hallelujah - and you can't avoid the comparison with this title - is not what Handel thought it was. It's not a chorus of angels, "It's not a cry that you hear at night, it's not somebody that's seen the light."

Whether the message connects with you or not, the song is incredibly persuasive because of its harmonic workings. That it tries to access a basic human experience - love - and that it acknowledges not just the stereotypical emotions we experience therein makes it all the more powerful. So many love songs are about wanting: I want you back, I want to hold your hand, I want you to live forever, and so on... Hallelujah expresses neither the pain of lost love nor the expectation of unrequited love. Rather, it tries to access the inexpressible desires - spiritual, musical, human - that cannot be fulfilled. It dashes the expectations of those naive love songs which believe that "happily ever after" means dancing every day: "Love is not a victory march." In Hallelujah, there is melancholy of the truest form, the unrequited, unspoken desires of being that are not good or evil or even in between.

I have chosen an exceptional case, however, for this reason. While Hallelujah accesses that essential feeling - doing it through both words and music - it does little more than alert us, or remind us, that it is there. How much modern music can even say that much? We may associate music with certain emotions and memories, but our own associations do not therefore make that music great. Even Hallelujah falls short, to my mind, of greatness because it feels so ravaged, so Orphic, so uncontrollable.

Modern music is almost always about the lyrics. Unfortunately, the result is that modern music has more complicated and sophisticated lyrics than the music of almost any other time, whilst having simpler harmonies, rhythms, and melodies. That doesn't mean modern music need not be enjoyable, but it does mean that, when you strip the lyrics away, you also strip the meaning away. Music without meaning is not, to me, great. Even Hallelujah - one of the closest things I can find to a piece of great, modern, popular music - is repetitive and essentially meaningless without its lyrics. Compare, again, Handel's Hallelujah. Take away the lyrics - which most people don't know anyway - and the meaning is still clear. The piece doesn't change without the words.

Perhaps modern music should be judged by the standards of poetry? That's fine with me. I'm certain a great deal of it is good or even excellent poetry. But that does not mean it is great music. Music is far too sacred an art, and far to complicated a craft, to strip it of its complexity and hope that it might still be great. Modulation (changing the tonic from one key to another during a piece) is not a necessary condition of greatness, but a piece without it has to work extra hard. Why? Because modulation helps to give a deeper, subtler sense of meaning to a work, and deep, subtle meanings are the especial purview of music.

Put it this way. Remember from a previous post what Arnold Schopenhauer said. Music is, essentially, the mind doing metaphysics. He argued, in short, that music is the only possible route to understanding what things really are. I don't know that I agree with that, but I do like the sentiment. Music is not a language, it is beyond language. Music expresses things which are beyond language. Poetry tries to do just that, but, in my opinion, music has preference over poetry because it does not merely try. It is hard to go beyond language with language, and so a music built upon lyrics is a music that has artificially limited itself. On the other hand, a music built upon music - even if that requires a little more study and effort on the part of the listener - is destined to express something a bit more essential.

Of course, you might hold that music does no such thing. Perhaps you say, "It's a vehicle for words, and without them, it is meaningless." Fair enough, but it doesn't sound that way to me. That, however, is the subject - or at least a part of the subject - of our next and final post in this series. While there are many possible avenues available, expect my rebuttal to your "music needs words" argument to come in the form of Beethoven.