What is Lester Bangs Lives?

Many years ago, I thought of it as a title for a radio show. Lester Bangs, if you don’t know, was a writer mostly known for his rock criticism published in Rolling Stone, Creem Magazine, and The Village Voice. I picked up a copy of Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste on a whim and fell in love.

I was in grad school at the time, trying to sort out my relationship to the violin and classical music, and was discovering that rock critics write about music in a way that resonates with me. Writing on classical music tends to focus on the compositional structure of a piece, its historical and biographical context, and the appraisal of performances. These are all (or at least can be) relevant components but there are missing pieces here- what about the experience of the listener, the performers, the composer? What, for instance, does the music make them feel or remind them of? Where does it take them? And what is the concert experience like?

The fun of reading Lester Bangs and other rock/pop/etc writers is that these aspects are woven in, so that you get a kaleidoscopic view of the music- not only how it sounds, but what the sound is doing for someone, and the environment in which it is made. Reading Lester, you not only learn about bands and albums of the 1970s but also about his own experience of the music. And you get a glimpse of what life was like at the time.

Lester often discusses the social implications of a given song and frames it within the context of the moment. There is an intersection of personal and collective experience I find exciting because it taps into the complexity of being human and seems to open up the conversation rather than reduce it down to a talking point.

Back in the classical realm. Without these personal/collective elements, the implication to me is that classical music, culturally, is a closed loop: an echo chamber of performance excellence, virtuosity, and serious music-making with little room for vulnerability or guidance to cultivate personal expression.

When I practice, learning pieces becomes a dance of including both the demands of the written score and all that it holds along with the freedom to bring in anything that seems relevant to me- like, for example, listening to Townes Van Zandt’s singing and thinking about how I might phrase a slow movement of solo Bach. It’s a tall order, one that is never completely realized, but that challenge is what makes playing classical music so invigorating. There’s always more to discover, if you’re open to it.

But within a closed loop, there’s no room for openness. This has become a big problem, as is illustrated by classical music institutions’ never-ending search for audiences. Most often this is tackled by “educating” listeners and incorporating pop culture elements into concerts in the hopes of drawing in more people. These attempts may or may not be effective, depending on how they’re executed. My theory is that the path through has to start with a consideration of the ways in which classical music is created in the first place. It’s an inside job down to the ways it is talked about, taught, practiced, and rehearsed. When these things are considered, the performances offered are richer in meaning because they come from a real place of growth and collaboration.

I think a lot of people within the field get this and are starting to make changes. This is my take. I am here to write about my own experience as a violinist and the challenges of being a professional musician with intense anxiety, particularly in classical settings. Along the way, I’ll fold in the many non-classical elements that influence me- pop and rock musicians, books, artists, terrain and travel- so that I can maybe get at that personal/collective crossroad.

And so I declare: Lester Bangs Lives! Eventually I’ll get to that radio show.