What Music Means to Me?

What does music mean to you? It is a question I have often asked the musicians I became acquainted with, not only to have their opinion but also to find out if music should touch me in some deeper way than merely provide a superficial enjoyment. The answers covered a wide range – from ‘a long hard slog to pay the bills’ from older orchestra members at one end to a ‘conversation with God’ from some composers and conductors at the other. If you ask the audience members, even those who are steeped in culture, the responses will vary from ‘nothing specific’ to ‘giving a meaning to life’ although they find it hard to explain what that phrase means.

As a music aficionado it has meant different things to me at different stages of my life. In childhood I sang the songs I made up when I was happy. As a teenager the music became an avenue to stroll along for solace; I focused on soulful music relating the misfortunes of the singer or the society which suited an introverted studious youth trying to survive in difficult circumstances. In contrast, the pampered youths from well off families were mostly interested in the music of love – read sex – profane and ethereal by turns because, for whatever reasons, that was their major preoccupation. As I grew older, I went through the stages of ‘spiritual’ hymns and chants, light-hearted operas and ‘heavy’ Mahler symphonies and Wagner operas laden with several layers of the ‘meaning of life’.

It is nothing new or original but I will say it anyway just because it needs to be said yet again. One likes a certain type of music because it touches something deep inside that is already there. Young and carefree men and women preoccupied with finding someone to love want songs of love and what love will do for the person it would be bestowed on. When underemployed and worried about how to feed the family (which that love may have created) they listen to the lament of how difficult the human existence is. Individuals fond of classical music are Haydn and Mozart fans when life is humming along but when daily struggles make them downhearted they switch to Mahler’s later symphonies. The truth is that the music does not make a listener happy or sad if s/he is not that way inclined already. In fact, if the mood of what is being performed is contrary to that of the listener, a curtain falls over the ears.

English composer Frederick Delius is quoted to have said, “Music is an outburst of the soul”. It is no doubt true for a composer, after all what is in the heart has to be in consonance with what echoes in the brain and comes out from the pen. But it is also valid for laypersons like me. The music one is attuned to reflects the state of the ‘soul’, does not alter it. Simply put, it is not the music that sets the mood, but the mood that selects the music one listens to, any thing else is ignored. Music played at wedding celebrations is joyous and it is enjoyed by the happy participants but it would not make the spurned lover of the bride less unhappy. Similarly, music at a funeral is sad because the tone of the event is sad. The music of longing is loved by those who are feeling unwanted; the ecstatic music is for people who are in love with life and feel that their love is being reciprocated. It is the feeling that is important; the actual situation is by the way. A café will play Bach’s Coffee Cantata and the tea house Coward’s Tea for Two because their customers are in mood for one and will be put off by the other. On a serious note, a devotee of Mozart or Puccini will not love Mahler so long as she does not know of her husband’s affair with her best friend and a lover of Mahler will move into Strauss Waltzes when he gets a big pay raise and his family life has settled down. It is the same in other art forms. I read (and write) tragedies when my heart feels the chill winds of autumn and turn to comedies when roses are in bloom.

If the premise of this essay is true, it has a lesson not only for psychoanalysts but also for the programmers of the orchestras. When the local economy is in a slump, you want to go heavy on Bruckner and Mahler as they should be doing in the American cities this season. On the other hand, when the jobless rate is low and audiences are feeling prosperous you want to load up on waltzes, marches and Eine Kleine Nacht Music. Opera companies should stage Parsifal around Easter to capitalize on the prevailing atmosphere just as ballet ensembles perform Nutcracker in December. The organisation that goes against the mood of the audience courts financial disaster.

Finally, arts in general and music in particular do not make me a better or worse human being, nor do they bring me in touch with the Lord or with the devil. Of course it may be so because I do not ‘understand’ art. On the other hand it is quite possible that I refuse to imagine what is not really there and do not wish to appear more knowledgeable than I really am.

‘Art for art’s sake’ is a good slogan for artists but it doesn’t work for me.

White Collar Crime and Punishment

In last two decades of last century Philips Environmental was a high flying public company listed on Toronto Stock Exchange. It was in the business of disposing garbage. It made money by separating marketable items, especially metals from what it collected. The stock price fluctuated based on the price of metals in the short time frame but the general trend was upwards. However, the bottom fell out in 1998 when it was discovered that the management was siphoning off company funds for their personal use on a massive scale. The company declared bankruptcy in 1999 and gullible fools like me lost all their investment in the company.

Two top executives of the company were prosecuted. Twelve years later, on October 24, 2011 one of them was sentenced to a long jail term and fined several million dollars. However, the punishment was suspended pending appeal to a higher court. It is anyone’s guess how many years it will be before The High Court and then the Supreme Court have had their say. The possibility that the accused would still be alive then is not very high. This case is an example of many other similar cases. The case of Livent CEO Garth Drabinski was in the courts for thirteen years and it is still waiting for an appeal to be heard by the Supreme Court although Mr. Drabinski is now in jail.

Compare these cases to those of the media mogul Conrad Black and billionaire hedge fund operator Raj Rajaratnam south of the border. Within a couple of years of the crime the cases were heard, appeals dealt with, sentences passed and guilty put behind bars. In these cases justice was done and seen to be done. For a severe punishment to be deterrence, it has to be prompt. Canadian laxity where it takes several years for a case to be brought to court, another few years for the judge to hear it, and after all that the culprits are almost certain to spend their days out on appeal unless they are blessed with exceptionally long lives. And here is the rub. Even when they are in jail, they have almost all the comforts of their home including television, computers with internet connections and email privileges. If this pampering was not enough, the sentence is generally reduced to as little as one sixth of the original as a reward for ‘good behaviour’ whatever that means. Given a system like this one wonders why white collar crimes are not present everywhere. I suspect that they are much more prevalent than we naively think; just that the regulatory bodies are not interested in uncovering them and it is only by accident that the most blatant ones come to light and are reported in the media.

Another example of white collar crime which no one cares to investigate and report is in the city halls, particularly in planning and development departments. One small example: mansions have been and are being built in my till recently upscale neighbourhood in Calgary which violate all building codes of the city, leave alone looking like a London (England) W.C. from the street. I do not believe for one moment that the officers in the city hall who approved the structural plans were not motivated by some extraneous considerations. Corruption in construction industry is not limited to Quebec and not to blue collar workers alone; it takes two to tango. Moreover, municipal corruption is a world wide phenomenon; there is no reason for Canadian cities to be immune from it.

Thought of the Week:

Does Sarah Palin’s withdrawal from the race for Republican nomination together with the drop in support of Perry-Bachman duo show that an iota of sense is returning to the Republicans and the pendulum is swinging against the Tea Party extremists? Or I am dreaming in Technicolor.

A Day Like Any Other

Ravi had a tough day at work. His boss was in a bad mood for one or more of various reasons: working at night on the files he had taken home, teenage daughters staying late with their boy friends or wife being upset at him for working all hours of the day and not paying her the attention she deserves – in her view anyway. Whatever the reason, the boss was more demanding than usual and blamed every one but himself for losing several important contracts in last few days. Ravi bore the brunt of his temper, being the only brownie in the department and less likely to pick up his coat and leave because it was not as easy for him to find another job as it would be for others. To top it all his Cheddar cheese and tomato sandwich was soggy when he managed to take a moment off work for lunch and the milk had gone off; not enough to throw away but to leave a bad taste anyway. On the way home he got wet in the rain, the bus was late and then it was held up in the traffic. However, Shalini was home as usual with a cup of Red Rose tea made with actual leaves not the tea bags from which all the flavour has been processed out and the colour of the back of his hand. As a good wife always does, she listened patiently to his troubles. After he had unloaded them on to her, Shalini suggested that he went to bed to rest for an hour. She even brought him three course dinner of mushroom soup, not from the can but home made with a mixture of black and white mushrooms which were forming amazingly accurate circles on the grass in the yard, fried chicken and chips with coleslaw and a selection of Indian sweets. The chicken was not the Colonel Sanders variety but from a recipe handed down from her grandmother, by all accounts a wonderful lady whom Ravi never met; she had passed away before he had the good fortune of marrying Shalini in a wedding ceremony in Mumbai which lasted ten days and cost her father hundred thousand rupees when one rupee could buy earthen mugs of tea for ten friends from a roadside stall, not that he would have ever stooped so low as to take his friends for tea anywhere other than Shahjahan Café and Tea Room.

All this attention revived Ravi, just as well because the rest hadn’t made much difference. Shalini took away the dishes and he picked up ‘Man’s Day’, a monthly designed to help men cope with their daily problems. His good wife had her dinner alone and joined him after cleaning up. No one knows who did it, doesn’t matter anyway, but the game of Master Mind was suggested. Shalini went to get the game from the cabinet in the basement and Ravi called their son in New Orleans. A chat about his problems with his ex and her children from her previous liaison revived Ravi. A discussion on his swing with his golfing buddy Andrew was next. Just as he put the phone down David from the office called to offer his sympathies about the rough treatment he had received from the boss and suggest ways of handling it in future. Then it was his bridge partner Victor calling about the tournament next month. Shalini read the Vanity Fair during these calls. She deserves a lot of praise, which she didn’t get, for waiting all this time without losing her cool. More so because it was now late for the game; she had an appointment with her hairdresser at the other end of town not much after dawn. Ravi felt really energetic now and went to the computer to catch up with messages and play internet poker with mixed results. By the time he got to bed Shalini was asleep. He watched the heavenly expression on her face for a while, thanked God of the Atheists, wherever he is, for granting him such a wonderful wife and rolled gingerly into slumber land.

Next morning, a Saturday, Shalini was out when Ravi woke up. He was pouring milk over Cheerios when she came in looking glum. Her expression worried him because it couldn’t be due to a bad cut; her hair looked great. “Is everything all right?” he asked with some trepidation. “Of course it is, except that every one who has any sense is going away to their cottage for the long weekend,” she answered unwittingly rubbing salt in his wounds – he was a failure who could not even buy a cottage his wife had wanted so much. She served herself some coffee, picked up the newspaper and disappeared into the small room which served as her home office. Ravi took his time finishing the breakfast and spent rest of the morning puttering in the garden.

Meeting the Rich Neighbour

The homes in Mountainview were built more than fifty years ago during the first wave of prosperity and growth in what was then known as a cow town. The detached houses had two or three bed rooms on one or two stories, modest even by the standards of those days. They did have a few strong points. It was a community of young middle class professionals and communal spirit was strong. There was, and still is, a good bus service to down town, educational institutions and two major shopping malls. We didn’t notice it then as something special but it has turned out to be that way. The community is located next to a park surrounding a man made lake that also served as city’s water supply. The views of rising and setting sun are spectacular and people came from all over the city to watch them. That is why homes backing on the park along Orange Grove Drive sell at a premium even though they are the same size as others.
The city has grown to quadruple the size over the years and the community is now regarded as the fringe of inner city rather than one of the suburban communities which are located up to an hour’s commute in all directions. The lake and the reservoir are untouched though and it still takes ten minutes to get to work downtown. The community now has an established old world charm with tall trees and established gardens in most homes. The house prices have gone up accordingly, up to ten times what the original buyers paid for them.
Every cloud has a silver lining and every blue sky has a dark cloud. Our dark cloud is a new fashion among the successful bankers and oil magnates. Rather than buy huge acreages around the city and build fifty room mansions with ten car garage and four swimming pools as they did till recently, they have started buying the homes backing on to the park. The homes are then demolished, in rare cases the building is sold and carted away to Nowhereland. The hole sits there for months till plans for a mansion are approved by the city. Many of these mansions are in gross violation of the building codes and there is a general suspicion among old-timers that a substantial amount of money is passed under the table to the right hands before the construction can begin. In any event, the residents of the community have suffered the disruption in their otherwise sedate lives by this destruction/construction process taking place in a sequential order across the Orange Grove Drive.
The mansions, about five times as big as other homes near them, face the park and from the street they have the appearance of public toilets in London or Paris. One never meets the residents in communal gatherings; their kids, if they have any, do not go to neighbourhood schools or play with other kids in play parks, they do not shop in the community plaza and no one ever has the good fortune of seeing any one who lives there. The whole street would become a ghost street if it were not for the families living in their humble homes across from the mansions.
The treasurer of the community association called me the other day with sad news. The lady who knocked on the doors and sold the membership in the community lost her husband last year and moved to a ‘senior’s village’. “Will you take over her job?” he asked me. I am not a community minded person and do not volunteer my time or money unless there is something in it for me. Therefore, my initial reaction was to refuse. But for once the brain was quicker than tongue and before my mouth opened it occurred to me that this will give me an opportunity to meet some of the mansion owners, in all likelihood not all of them had butlers working late in the evening on weekends. So my mouth changed its round shape to an elliptical one and ‘yes, of course’ popped out. A couple of days later, a stack of books of receipts was in my mailbox. On the following Saturday I went to all the older homes, had pleasant conversations in most of them and had checks totaling more than a thousand dollars in the bag.
After a discussion with my wife who is exceptionally conversant in such matters I set out at eight in the evening to knock on the door of the mansions. The idea was that the owners must be back by now from their weekend cabins and should be sitting down in front of their wall size screens with vintage port in their hands. Alas, what do we know of the ways of the rich? There was no response to my knocks on any of the doors and I was getting disheartened. Was nobody in the house because they are driven straight to schools and work on Monday morning or they had no time for ordinary folks? I do not know the real answer, it doesn’t matter anyway. This is when my prayers – sorry knocks – were answered and a young man dressed for a date with a star stood before me, a cigar in his hand. I was rather nonplussed for a moment. “I am selling membership for Mountainview Community Association. Will you be interested, sir?” I said after recovering my bearings and with respect due to someone living in the biggest mansion in the area even though he seemed to be younger than my children.
“We don’t really have much to do with the community. We are so busy – my wife is a Criminal Defense Lawyer and I am the President of Canadian division of the Universal Bank. We don’t have time to breathe, leave alone participate in community activities,” I heard.
“The association helps residents in several ways, sir. It represents the interests of the community to various levels of government. For instance, we are working hard to preserve the pristine nature of the park from a road they want to build with a bridge across the lake,” I presented my side of the argument.
“Yes, that is interesting and very worthwhile. How much is the membership?” I heard.
“It is fifty dollars for the family, forty for individuals, sir. You would want the family membership I expect.”
“Not so fast. Considering that our children are too young to use community facilities and will not use them any way and that we ourselves don’t have much use for the community either, is there something like honorary membership at reduced fee, say ten dollars?”
I was dumbfounded. I am certain no one had ever made this argument before. Still, it was better than plain no and having the door banged on my face. I scratched the bald spot on my head and said, “It is a great idea and I will present it to the President in the next meeting. For now though, family membership is your only option, sir.” I did not want to tell him of the obvious option of outright refusal.
“Look, I did not get to be where I am in the world for nothing. I earn my million dollar bonus by watching every penny for the bank. That is what I do at home too. That is why I am answering the doorbell – paying a butler double time on weekend evenings is waste of money. You get them to have a cheap membership for people like us and come back. Thank you for dropping by.”
He turned back but not before blowing the cigar smoke in my face. I saw what was coming and jumped back before the door closed. On the way home I had a chuckle. So, I do not live in a mansion with a butler to answer the door because I give money to support the community association. Does that make me a wastrel? Perhaps, but only in the eyes of the banker living in a mansion.