Mozart in the Morning

I have unexpectedly and recently become a Mozart fan. I listen to my new free Mozart sampler CD and think, why did anyone in the West bother writing music for the next 200 years until they invented the electric guitar?

The CD came in the mail. If I subscribed to the CD-of-the-month club, I would get A Free Gift, plus more CD's in the mail that I would have to pay for. I immediately threw out all the paperwork, but kept the CD. It's not bad, and came with a nifty little booklet that put Mozart into better perspective for me. Did you know Mozart was around at the time of the American War of Independence? That he was born a few years before Handel died? The booklet had a brief biography and a painting of Salz burg at the time Mozart lived there.

I enjoy listening to our free CD in the mornings as I drive my son to school. We hit a few traffic backups every day, but with my Mozart filling up the car, I remain placid and unconcerned.  A friend told me that there have been studies that show that Mozart music is directly wired into the lizard brain. You can Google this even, although you need to type in "Mozart" and "limbic" to get anything helpful. This makes me wonder, how this could be. How could a brain come into existence that so perfectly mapped our most primal mind? How could his music be so intricate, and complex, and cerebrally stimulating, yet so sweet it makes you want to weep while you wait for the light to change? It's like his whole brain was some sort of metabrain that came into existence in a human skull, in a miracle of mystery on a rival with animals that change colour with the seasons and antimatter.

I was also wondering why Mozart, why now? I normally hate classical music, with its turgid sawing violins, choppy rhythms, claustrophobic wall of sound, and irritating melodrama. My friend reminded me that I had once told her I hate classical music because that's all my mother played when I was growing up. That and Broadway show music, which I perversely don't mind at all. I speculated that perhaps my mother didn't play that much Mozart.

Thinking about it now as I write this, I wonder if maybe its because I have grown old enough to forget the things that made my childhood so bleak even as I remember more and more specific events about it. Not the dramatic moments, which are seared in there, but all the boring everyday things that will crowd my conversation as I grow older and older. You know, the stories about the walk to the corner to catch the bus in the 40 below zero blizzard conditions kinds of stories.

Somehow, it seems the emotional content of those other memories has started to fade away. Not just the merciful blur phenomenon, where the painful things are hidden safely in the dark, but in a calm and distanced sort of way. I find myself thinking absently along these lines more often: Yes, it was traumatic and all fucked up, but oh well, I mustn't forget to buy cat food today.

Anyway, I recommend a nice Mozart CD for the morning drive, if you are so unfortunate as to have to endure such a thing. You may even want to sing along.