Ecstatic Peace

 

Danzon No. 2 and I will not stay friends for very long — in fact, the bonds are weakening even as we speak. It’s got a specific ephemeral quality to it, where you suck all possible joy out of it in a compressed period of time. Then you part ways for a few months or so, until your orbits intersect once more.

In the two weeks that I’ve been mortally obsessed with it, it’s had a strange effect on me. There’s the full body tingling at each transition. Or, like, my head becoming really scrunched and compact during a build up, following by — whoosh! — complete emptiness upstairs. Light-headed, ecstatic peace. Or my face feeling flush. Turning a sparkling shade of turquoise. Sensing imminent heaviness in the eyes. Getting so immersed in the piece that I forget to exhale. Heart rate yo-yoing. Feeling uncontrollable euphoria.  

Basically, if it weren’t already clear, Danzon No. 2 is physical music, the kind of piece you hear with your whole body. An eruption of pure overwhelming joy. Not to sound like a two-bit spiritual conman, but it provokes a fragile synergy between the sounds and the body (like all trumpet music tends to*). It gives as much as it asks of you. It’s humbling.

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(* Also, all cello music too. All string quartets do that. Some piano music does that. Every single melody on the harp or the glockenspiel does it. For some people, not me though, the classical guitar has that effect. The oud, for sure. [A quick aside to the aside: I tried to buy an oud once, knowing full well that I cannot, for the life of me, play a fretless instrument. Mercifully, I was priced out of it — a second-hand one would have set me back Rs. 70k, and that's without the international delivery charge, import duty, and all the other hidden expenses that go with it.] Then there’s this sitar-like African instrument whose name I forget. Many Chinese string instruments. Come to think of it, it’s a long list.)

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And the piece is so deceptive. The opening melody on the woodwinds has a playful, mischief-making tendency to it — that fleeting, fraction-of-a-second break in the tune transforms it entirely. The violins and percussions build on that emotion. And then you sort of know what’s going to happen next. At least I thought I did.

I listen to a decent — not excessive — amount of classical music. A lot of it develops an easy, tempting melody at first to comfort the listener and place her in the moment, before shifting moods to something more challenging. (For reference, listen to the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and contrast its simplistic grace to the far more defiant intensity of its second movement.) The drama of classical music lies in its ability to surprise you (and move you) with these grand tonal departures between parts and movements. There’s a unifying concept holding the whole thing together, but within that lies a world of decorative swings. Maximalism, at times for its own sake, but just as often profound and affective.

Danzon No. 2 takes a slightly different approach. It’s a famous contemporary orchestral piece from '94, built on modern traditions, by Mexican composer Arturo Marquez. My memory of art history is, let’s say, strained, but from what I remember, contemporary classical music basically retains the spirit of old-timey classical music while at the same time generously shitting on every established convention in the form. A movement that, at its roots, was anti-prescriptive (though it may have fallen into those same traps later, sparking more abstract postmodern movements). (Just a disclaimer: all of this could be completely bull — literally zero research has gone into these claims I’ve just confidently made.) 

Anyway, what Danzon does instead is it takes that initial melody, and then, for the next 10 minutes, it goes bigger. And bigger. And bigger. It mangles that early motif, manipulates it, threatens to disintegrate into chaos. It smashes into that melody from all sides. It speeds up and slows down. It descends into complete silence, erupts into inexplicable orchestral crescendos. But it never loses its heart. When you think the piece has probably reached its peak, and it’s time for a change, it pulls out, like, a 14^th rabbit.

What’s remarkable is that, thoughtful as all its melodies are, they’re also very immediate and accessible and enormous. Almost Bollywood-like in their approachability. That kind of stuff — pop music-adjacent — is almost always thrilling but loses its shine quickly. It gets old and repetitive.

Maybe it’s the time in life I heard this piece, or maybe it’s the fact that I’m a total sucker for compositions that retain a singular focus and experiment with themes of minimalism. Either way, for my ears, the piece — at a formidable 10 minutes — never once overstays its welcome. It twinkles all through.

Sadly, our relationship is now on its last legs. The connection is dissolving into long passages of silence followed by little crumbs of fleeting comfort. I no longer get that physical rush from the song. I’m in that agonising limboish stage where I’m left with very vivid past memories that I keep trying (and failing) to recreate. And I’m filled with the fear of impending loss. It’s going to leave me soon — in another day or two it will start to get on my nerves. In three days, it will pass right through me. Plus ca change though — all we’re really trying to do is recreate the rush over and over again, scared to death that one day we won’t be able to. And on it goes.