When in Doubt, Daydream

At a recent chamber music concert, a man brushed by me as he hurried out of the theater before the second piece started.

“My husband hates Bartok,” said a woman a few seats away. “He’ll be back after intermission, for Mozart.”

About the same time, a woman and her young daughter had moved into some empty seats in the row behind me so the girl, said her mother, “could see the first violinist better.”

As the music--Bartok’s thorny Fourth Quartet--started, I could hear the girl begin to fidget. She had a good view of the musicians, and there was a lot to see as this amazing music unfolded because they often played the instrument in unfamiliar ways (bowing on the bridge; plucking strings hard enough that they bounced back from the fingerboard).

But the girl grew increasingly restless, perplexed and disturbed. She and her mother didn’t return after intermission, Mozart or no.

Later I pondered what I--anyone--could have done to make the experience more interesting, more pleasurable for them. What could I have done to keep them listening?

Maybe it’s none of my business. Let the music take care of itself. It works for you or it doesn’t. Maybe it just takes time.

But you don’t have to have a professional investment in the field to realize that these reactions are all too typical. This is wonderful music, but it’s not easy to listen to.

So at the risk of incurring the contempt of professional musicians and teachers, here’s my modest suggestion to anyone who’s troubled when listening to unfamiliar music:

Make your own mental movie.

You don’t have to tell anyone what you’re doing. You don’t have to create a plot or characters. Just evoke pictures, feelings or moods, and you can jump-cut or segue slowly into whatever you like, at whatever pace you feel motivated to choose.

Yes, I know this is not the advice you’re supposed to get or give.

The professional point of view is that music doesn’t “paint pictures” or “tell stories.” I particularly like the one that says “Music doesn’t express anything but itself.”

I wonder what that means.

Imagine telling Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Penderecki, Bartok, Shostakovich or Schoenberg, “Your music doesn’t express anything but itself.”

I wouldn’t want to be in the same room when they gave their answers.

I remember how music captivated me when it was used as the themes of the radio programs I avidly listened to as a child. Would I or anyone ever glide over snow as elegantly as the Canadian Mounties seemed to in “Sgt. Preston of the Yukon” to Von Reznicek’s “Donna Diana” Overture?

Would fantasy and romance ever be as sweet as the images evoked at the start of a program of tales from the Arabian Nights, thanks to the love theme in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”?

And doesn’t Disney have a lock forever on the magic of winged horses for those who saw them flying weightlessly in “Fantasia” to Beethoven’s “Pastorale” Symphony?

So go ahead. Relax. React. Feel free. Get involved. Somehow.

Let Bartok paint pictures of a Europe torn apart by a world war, of a small country ravaged by larger, more powerful ones--and still come out with faith in the power of life to surmount all.

Making movies won’t necessarily be the only way you’ll listen to music, or even the ultimate way you will listen to it.

Who knows? Someday you may hear all those formal symmetries, the “arch form,” the “ABCBA” design, and marvel. But until that time, please keep listening.

Come back, little girl.