New and In Love

It was late summer in 1945 and I was eighteen, in bed in my ex-girlfriend’s classy one-room apartment on Wilson Ave. in Chicago while she was out of town. I was sick with an awful cold and fever, although not seriously ill. Actually I was quite comfortable as I lay in the almost total darkness. I had taken some aspirin as well as a few puffs of cannabis sativa, that restorative herb, that ancient weed. Being a bit feverish didn’t hurt either: I was primed nicely for what followed.

I turned on the radio by the bed, and then---by the magic of pure coincidence---immediately from the radio came, as though on cue, the very first notes of Igor Stravinsky’s music for the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, the Rites of Spring. The room, the dark, my slightly fevered and slightly stoned consciousness, became infused with outrageous masses of sound and violent atavistic rhythms, completely new sounds, primal, harsh, dissonant. This was an absolutely virginal experience for me. I had never heard anything like this before nor could I have dreamed that ‘classical music’ could be like this. As I lay in the dark I was immersed not just in the music but in the newness of the experience, I was subjugated by these awful and beautiful sounds unlike anything anyone had heard before 1913, just thirty-two years earlier. For me what was happening was as though on the other side of trauma, trauma in reverse, intense arousal and initiation into a completely new pleasure and excitement.

It’s generally agreed that modern music began with the first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps in Paris in 1913. The sophisticated Parisian audience reacted violently to the abomination. A riot broke out, there were fist fights in the aisles, the police were called---birth pangs of the new music. A dramatic shift was taking place all too suddenly, just as Stravinsky had described “the violent Russian Spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking.”(see note 37)

For me, a kid traveling around, an aspiring musician, what a lucky way to fall in love with serious music beyond big bands and jazz and blues. And what a lucky way to fall in love with the excitement of the new, not the merely novel, as ever recurring and promising as “the whole earth cracking” into the beginnings of the next cycle, the next new state of being.