Looking at what my interests are these days, I suppose it was only a matter of time, but a very funny thing happened on the bus ride home today: Me, Edward Gibbon, and Dmitri Shostakovich got it on. Okay, Gibbon was just kind of watching; I wasn’t having a very good reading on the bus day. He was sitting on my lap though, and that has to count for something.

Alright, alright, no more lurid and turgid metaphors. At least not right now. Something pretty great happened on that bus, and the crude jokes will probably end up tarnishing this whole thing.

Over the years, in both formal education and my own private education, I’ve formed my own personal little system for interpreting works. I am fairly positive that “my” system isn’t really mine, that it has its own, legitimate name, or multiple names, but I’ve managed to put the pieces together by myself, without any real outside influence, so I’m counting it as my own thing. Similarly, I am sure that some of the things I felt and thought while listening to Shostakovich’s 7th and 8th symphonies have been said elsewhere, in no doubt more expanded, educated, and elegant terms, but I reached my interpretation and meaning by myself, so I’m planting my flag on it. A good starting point for this whole piece is a brief description on the methodology I use to interpret art.

Whether writing or film or something else, most of the things I consume are works of fiction, and the way I choose to interpret things owes a lot, maybe even everything, to this. Even most of the music I listen to is lyrical, thus presenting narratives to read. The way I consume and decode narrative works is to take them as their own product. The life of the author is generally not very important when I read things; similarly, other things that are outside the scope of the work are generally discarded. For example, unless a work presents a good reason for knowing the history of the era in which it was written, it’s not important to me. Naturally, rules like that fall to the wayside when I am dealing with just about any sort of nonfiction, but they hold true almost all the time when dealing with fiction. Any well composed fiction can very easily be taken as its own work, from Greek dramas, to Shakespeare, to today.

I know there are people that don’t jive with this school of interpretation, that the text is the entirety of the text. For example, Nabokov spoke at length about, say, things that happened after the conclusion of Pale Fire. That stuff never, ever counts, and at worst, like in Nabokov’s case above, he’s doing his work a disservice. Knowing that Nabokov tried to say something “official,” to solve some of Pale Fire’s mysteries, takes away from the power and meaning of the work. I mean, what the hell does my divergent interpretation of Pale Fire mean when I know The Man himself said it means something different? For being a master of the form, Nabokov pretty much drew a mustache on his Mona Lisa right there. But to the point, the text is the text. Feel free to read criticisms and interpretations, but I feel that sort of thing is done best after one’s own interpretation has been at least started, so not to muddy things up and keep one’s ideas as one’s own. And heck, nobody wants to encounter a Nabokov. I thought Pale Fire was a work of a genius when I read it, with multiple interpretations of depth. Then I read what Nabokov had to say, and I learned that it clearly doesn’t take a perfect genius to produce works of genius.

This was all kind of turned on its ear today, as I learned that what counts as acceptable interpretation in one field doesn’t quite float in another. I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music lately, a phase started by the previously documented Kubrick watching. Listening to Beethoven and Rossini was fine—great even—but it wasn’t all that long before I wanted something a bit more contemporary. Turning again to Kubrick (in this case, to Eyes Wide Shut), I decided to try out the work of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Not being able to find easily obtainable copies of the song used in association with EWS, I ended up getting a few symphonies, along with some piano work. And it was good! Good music, very diverse sounding between movements. Powerful. Some great strings in there. But that’s all it was to me. Good classical music. Definitely entertaining. Good thinking music.

But it was still just classical music.

I’m not sure what exactly lead me to do so, but during an extended bout of wiki-ing, I ended up reading quite a bit about the life of Shostakovich. Through the magic of Wikipedia, I ended up reading a lot about the Soviet Era, learning about many things that they probably should be covering in schools. This paragraph looks short, but it’s probably the most important bit to this whole entry.
A few days later and it was, well, today. I put on Shostakovich’s 7th and 8th symphonies, one after the other, and everything snapped together. There was a great clicking. Listening to the music, knowing the conditions under which these pieces were originally commissioned, knowing Shostakovich’s life at the period, all this going on, and the music was more than just classical music. The biographical and historical details, interesting on their own, when mixed with the music, everything here combined to be more than the sum of the parts.

Knowing about Shostakovich’s bumpy relationship with the Soviet government, along with knowing a bit about the Great Terror, and how it affected him, add greatly to the appreciation gained when listening to the music of this period. Knowing that the 8th is supposed to be about triumph, and hearing it go from somber to dire, probably the exact opposite of what the Soviets wanted, is extremely satisfying. To Shostakovich, the “triumph” of the Soviets was indeed, nothing to be celebrated. This irony, something that can only be known today by going outside the text, is one of the most satisfying aspects of the music. I would have missed the best part of this music had I stuck to my normal interpretive rules.

There are many other examples of the above that occurred during my recent listen, but I’m not going to recount them right now. I might not get everything right, and really, it takes but an evening to read the appropriate material, and a bit more than an hour to listen to each symphony. I would be doing the facts, the history, and the music a disservice by describing everything here. Even if I did get the history right, the music is something I can’t even pretend to accurately describe. It’s important to note that I am no musician, but I still feel like I have gotten a lot out of this music. I didn’t even know or believe that such meaning and emotion could be drawn from music without words, at least not without being a musician. We all know I’m a big fan of self-deprecation, so here is our dose for today: If I can appreciate the music of Dmitri Shostakovich on a level deeper than “gee, this music is pretty,” then anyone can.

So what next for me? This is like a new dawn for listening to music. How many other great composers are there? How many great lives and great pieces of music? I can see this classical phase going on for quite some time. And heck, I am starting piano lessons soon, which means I might even be able to appreciate the music on yet another level.

Will all of this change how I read books and watch movies? Probably not. I think the way I interpret things is probably the best for fiction, at least most of the time. There are exceptions, as there are in all things, but you can only do the whole “untarnished” interpretation thing the first time you encounter a work, so even when the “text is the text” interpretation isn’t the best way to do things, you can really only do it in your first encounter with a work, so it should always be the first way you read a text. That probably also applies to classical music, too. The difference is that for narratives, I am saying that first interpretation is the most meaningful; for classical music, it’s the later, informed “reading” that is best.