I took music history in college for no real reason other than that I needed the hours and the class was open. Yet in some strange way, it was the most important course I ever took.
The teacher was a wild-haired German immigrant who would lecture from his piano bench. As a teenager, he had been herded by the Nazis into halls in Berlin to be indoctrinated with German nationalism. As a young man, he had been forced to serve in the German military. Somehow—he never told us how—he wound up emigrating to America and becoming our professor.
He constantly turned around to illustrate whatever point he was making by playing the piano with strange, sudden passion, as if the music were erupting out of him. It was that habit of moving around, of illustrating his points with actual music, of demanding that we learn something by hearing it that impressed me.
One spring day, he was discussing Modernism, illustrating this and that, turning to the piano and then to us, pointing out the window at the springtime as he began talking about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. When he turned back to the class, he saw that we had no earthly idea what he was talking about. He stopped cold.
We were lousy students. Even the music majors in the class were mediocre, more interested in being cool than in learning. Though we had lived during the remarkable historical events of the late 60s and the early 70s, we had hardly noticed them. We were certainly not interested in those who came before our time. We were spoiled children of affluence, soft and fat from too much television, too much fast food, and too little work. We were always on the verge of falling asleep in class.
“Next time, vwe vwill hear The Rite of Spring,” he said.
And the next time we entered the classroom, the top of the grand piano was closed and held an enormous stereo with huge JBL speakers.
“Now, The Rite of Spring,” he said as he cranked up the music.
In that 33 or so minutes, with the strange quirkiness of Stravinsky’s music catapulting and booming from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling, our professor demonstrated how to listen to music. He forced us to sit and do nothing but that. His own demeanor, resembling that of a Buddhist monk in meditation, showed us how to do it. His posture demanded that we listen, would take nothing less. It was like being in church, except that the music was wild, wilder than anything I had heard in my forays into the nether world of acid rock or bebop.
When the music ended, our professor looked up as if he were coming out of a trance. “Dhere is nothing to say after something like dhat,” he said. “Leave.” He pushed his hands toward us as if he were brushing us out of the room so that he could continue to contemplate the music.
A good hour of class remained, yet he was dismissing us, which should have caused joy in students as worthless as we were. But we left silently, as if leaving a sacred place. Despite my habitual sloth, I spent the next hour doing exactly what I presume our professor wanted us to do: sitting on the college green and thinking about The Rite of Spring. In some ways I am still thinking about it, still living in the wake of the final note of that symphony more than 30 years later.
The Rite of Spring is a sustained attempt to capture in sound and rhythm the wild possibility that lives in every moment but that is embodied in spring, when green leaves shoot out of bare branches and flowers explode from buds, sending pollen showers into the air, creating new life. When tornadoes rip through the sky and destroy houses, towns, lives. When revolutions upend governments, leaving in the rubble the seeds of a new, unknown order.
The Rite of Spring teaches us not only that music can be made up of sounds and rhythms distinctly unmusical, but also that anything can happen at any time. It teaches us to be alert for the unexpected, to watch out of the corners of our eyes. It teaches us that nature sets its own course and moves in mysterious ways and that to follow, we must always be supple and alert. But most of all, it teaches us the danger of falling asleep. We may wake up thrown into the clouds like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
If any class needed to hear The Rite of Spring, our music-history class did. We were ne’er-do-well sleepers content to go through the motions. We had fallen victim to one of the most common enemies in any class: malaise. It lingers in every corner of every classroom, waiting to suck the life out of the room. After all, class is not real life: It is preparation for the real life that waits outside the windows. By the time a student has finished college, she will have lived through hours and hours of talk, talk, talk, discussion, discussion, discussion—why should anyone give it any more than half a mind?
Because the professor demands it, that’s why.
The most obvious way instructors demand wakefulness is with grades. But those are at best a deterrent to inattention. They cannot rivet the imagination the way the best classes do. The best teachers—the ones who demand attention—are awake themselves to the texture of the class, the vibe. And like my music-history professor did, they respond quickly, inserting into the planned lecture or choreographed PowerPoint a digression, amplification, or demonstration that functions as a shout as sudden as a spring thunderstorm. This is risky because sometimes it fails utterly, leaving behind confusion, scorn, or indifference. But the alternative is worse—allowing the class to plod along one well-worn step after another, as the students drift off into daydreams.
Out of my 20 years as a student, I can remember in detail only a handful of classes, one of them the spring day on which my music-history professor played Stravinsky. The others exist only in the hazy backwater of my memory—classes in which professors went through the motions just as we students did. The teaching was not terrible, just routine and dull. On some level, it has to be that way. Learning is, after all, hard work. But so often in those classes, I felt the malaise filling the room like mustard gas. I longed for the sudden thunderstorm, the explosion, the exit into real life that would make me remember why I came, why I was alive.
In the dull drudgery of winter, there is the possibility of spring—that is what we live for.
As a teacher myself, I have struggled to reproduce the lesson of that music-history class. I have come to realize that I cannot capture it any more than Stravinsky could cram springtime into his symphony. The best I can do is stay alert and try to awaken the nodding heads before me with this or that sudden jerk into the real world, hoping that it works and that the students don’t just think I am crazy.
Perhaps the lesson is simply this: You take a course from a wild-haired professor for no apparent reason, a course that has no application to what you do, and it alters the landscape of your life.
