Play Favourites. Go Ahead.
June 28 2010

Be brave. Play favourites.

Favourite. From the Latin faveo, favere meaning to have favour for.

The Pianobabbler plays favourites.

The Pianobabbler plays musical favourites. He has and he plays, with not a moment’s compunction, favourite recordings.

Is this such a big deal? Yup. A big deal. Favouritism entails exclusion. Restless sits exclusion in an inclusive era. Everything and everyone wants affirmation. Opinion abates affirmation. Approve everything, as an affirm-all ethos demands, and opinion dies. One needs to affirm and reject. Yes means nothing without no.

Hence the big deal in having favourites. By uttering a Joycean yes to some music, the Pianobabbler has to no what he knows seduces yes from others. This risks offending, even enraging, others.

For example: Mozart. Don’t like his work. A few exceptions: the Gran Partita K. 361, and most of his minor key compositions. Never really have liked him, however. I tried. Years of study and play. But, the lazy linear diatonicity, with burbling basslines- Alberti and others -and grand declamatory cadences have consistently failed to steam my peas.

A minority Mozart opinion, to say the least. You should see the looks that opinion buys me (although Glenn Gould did make a television show called How Mozart Became a Bad Composer.)

So be it. Opinions have the Newtonian property of eliciting an equal and opposite reaction. Real opinions elicit real reactions. Nicholas Slonimsky published a glorious book of such opinions from the 19th and 20th centuries: A Lexicon Musical Invective. Have a look at it. See how you react.

Confound not opinion for disdain. Mozart may not tickle the Pianobabbler's joyspot, but I do respect him. Mozart could compose like no other. The operas display genius. Unfortunately, it's genius of the soporific genus. The operas just put me to sleep.

Discrimination, from the Latin for to select, used to carry no association with bigotry. In older times, in older English, it meant good judgment.

Caught up in the virtuous cause of eliminating intolerance discrimination, both the word and the deed, fell into the pit of opprobrium. All discrimination became odious, even the constructive kind, i.e. discerning opinion.

So we came to where we are today: acceptance holds sway over opinion. We over-affirm to avoid seeming narrow. Heaven forbid one should express a negative opinion about music today that goes on to become the enduring classic of tomorrow. We fear becoming that guy, the one who hissed and spit on first hearing Beethoven’s 9th, Charlie Parker, and the Beatles. The one whose opinions we read in Slonimsky's book with ex postfacto superior mirth.

We should have no Fear. We should risk the ridicule in the name of honest opinion. For every that guy, one finds a hundred whose views helped shape and advance the collective musical aesthetic.

And so, the Pianobabbler says: Be brave. Play favourites. One should never have to defend or apologize for authentic musical tastes.

Next week, the Pianobabbler will dress his play favourites principle in real clothes. I’ll set out a list of my all-time favourite piano recordings. I’ve invited others to let me know theirs, and have had some wonderful responses. If you haven’t spoken up yet, please do so. Leave a comment below, on Facebook or on Twitter.

Just don’t tell me you love Mozart.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

The Pianobabbler is a RonDavisMusic production. The Pianobabbler's blog posts appear weekly at pianobabber.com. Please remember to leave your comments and thoughts below. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And subscribe to RonDavisNews by clicking on the link, above right. And follow us on Twitter.

blog comments powered by Disqus