Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Classical Music

One of the things I love about music it's its inherent capacity to transmit ideas and perspectives. I always considered music to be a "time machine" - when we close our eyes and listen attentively we can be transported through space and time, as if -just for a brief moment- ignoring the laws of Physics in order to follow those laws of Memory and Imagination.

To me, the act of listening to 'classical music' represents a journey in space and time to the Europe of the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. When I hear the works of Chopin, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mozart, Tschaikovsky and Schubert I suddenly find myself in Florence, Rome, Vienna, Berlin, Saint Petersburg or Moscow, inside the palaces of extinct kingdoms and wandering across long-forgotten war fields. With easiness I find myself submerged in by-gone worlds, in the Modern and Pre-Contemporary Era of Western History, in the "Old World" and its natural and historical beauty.

Spanning from Barroque to Romanticism, the sublime works of these composers of old allow us to glance, with increasing wonder, the world in which they lived. I really appreciate the treasures of Classical Music, because they allow me to have a glimpse of an era I did not experience, but would have loved to. I even become nostalgic at times - nostalgic of an era I missed because I was born two or three centuries later, in the stupid banality of the XXI Century, where what is plastic, easy, stupid, and simple is praised over what is artistic, complicated and classic.