I’m not a trained musicological professional but…

Let’s call this post sort of a review.

I fell in love with a piece of music for the first time my junior year of college. Sure, I’d listened to songs incessantly before, pop shaping and pinning down the tiniest details of my life. Hum “I am a Rock” and I taste 10th-grade January air; play anything from The Shins or Iron & Wine on your café soundtrack and you’ll transport me back to daydreaming in Willets Underground. But classical music (Am I allowed to call it that as a blanket term, guys? If the piece I’m going to talk about is from the 20th century?)... That’s a different story. While there are pieces I grew up with—New World Symphony, lots of Beethoven, the strains framing Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery—I never had a symphony that was mine.

Then one fall day I followed some friends to the Philadelphia Orchestra’s opening concert. I don’t remember the company (could’ve been anyone—you’re all musicians, dear friends, aren’t you?) or the other piece on the program. But there was Shostakovich’s 5th symphony. And there I was. A piece of music never gripped me so viscerally before. From the ominous opening to the—seems to me—perfectly wistful melody at the end of the first movement; from the long beautiful largo to the crazy finale march, everything about the symphony made me want to know more. Not that I thought it could tell me a story, or that I could presume to analyze its chords and learn something about 20th-century composition. I just wanted to know every note of that thing, to have it live within me.

And so it has. I feel confident asserting that I am the world’s most opinionated Shostakovich 5 non-musical-scholar. Let’s talk recordings, for instance. I downloaded and fell for an unlabeled version of the symphony. When my ipod broke and the file’s anonymity meant I couldn’t get it back, I was really upset. Just ask anyone in the music library at the time. So I listened to a variety of other recordings until I found out which one was mine. In the meantime, I had plenty of opinions about some of the unchosen few…like the Bernstein recording I acquired, with its slow and thunderingly menacing conclusion. Argh. Thanks to musicological M— I now know a lot about the historical context of the piece. It’s pretty basic knowledge that Shostakovich wrote it in a time of Soviet censorship and oppression. People have argued that the ending is a positive, triumphal vindication of the principles of communism. They’ve said that Shostakovich was a secret dissident—listen to the menacing sound of those final bars. Dance, damn you! Or we’ll kill you. I don’t know which of these is true. What speaks to me is the uncertainty itself. I’m fascinated by moments when two realities seem to exist at the same time. My recording of choice sticks with me because of the way it brings out this ambiguity. There are moments when everything is ready to come crashing down; there are moments when it seems like a note of victory lances through the oppression and promises to get us all where we need to be. Anything could happen.

And so I’ve made Shostakovich 5 a fiber of my being. I’ve listened to it while reading Kafka in the Science Center and on my way to a fancy dinner. I’ve listened to it as I thought my heart was about to break for one reason or another and while sitting on a swing outside my dormitory on a cool sparkling spring night. I’ve listened to it in the morning, disembarking from a train—watch how the bright station is suddenly rendered sinister—and at night drifting off to sleep. (“Yeah, nice bedtime music, if you want to dream about someone eating your babies!” quoth my roommate at the time.) I’ve walked through the city and through the woods with it. If I grow to love another piece of music even half so well (and I might have—more suggestions always welcome!), I will be lucky indeed.