Incipit vita nova

Dal mio Pernesso amato a voi ne vengo,
Incliti eroi, sangue gentil de regi,
Di cui narra la Fama eccelsi pregi,
Ne giunge al ver perch'e alto il segno.

Senior year of high school, my music theory special topics teacher gave me a long list of music to listen to. I listened to the two excerpts featured in the Norton Antholog of Western Music: La Musica's prologue and Orfeo's aria "Tu se morte." I was unimpressed; the only note I wrote was "Same ritornello every time." (Funny that a ritornello should be repeated.) At that point, I was more interested in dense Wagner scores than baroque opera.

Freshman year of college, I studied Monteverdi again, in the context of a class on Baroque music. Still hated him. Mostly. However, he was starting to infect me. By the next year, it was too late. I couldn't deny it any more. I loved Monteverdi.

Years later, I moved to China for a year, and had a chance to learn about Chinese classical music. I discovered one of the interesting qurks of history: L'Orfeo, the first great European opera, was written 9 years after the greatest Chinese opera, 牡丹亭 (The Dream of the Peony Pavillion). The stories are remarkably similar. Both involve a man who brings his lover back to life. Orpheus uses his legendary songs to win over Pluto, only to lose her when he thinks she has left him for one moment. Tang Xianzu tells a classic Chinese tale, of lovers who meet in a dream. She dies of grief, realizing that she will never meet him. Three years later, he sees a portrait of her, and cries out; his cries bring her back from the dead.

Across the world from each other, Tang and Monteverdi couldn't have conceived that they were writing their own cultures' versions of the same story in the same decade.

These are the connections I want to explore. All classical music is fair game, from a Sumerian hymn written four thousand years ago to the music still being written. It has become conventional wisdom of late that classical music is somehow dying. I'm not interested in classical music's death. Instead, I'm looking for the song of Orpheus, or cry of Liu, that will give classical music new life.