A Night Of Classical Music

I can't read The New York Times  today.  I can't think about the election another moment.  Thank God, we do not watch television, and I am thanking God for that as well because news on television is on a new level of inanity.  But I cannot read another analysis of something which will become a reality on Tuesday.  I always remember the people at The Chicago Tribune set the headline for "Dewey Beats Truman," and were quite wrong.  I have never had so visceral a dislike of a candidate as I feel for Mr. Trump; in general I am suspicious of heterosexual males and when I sense the braggadocio, the I can get it for you wholesale, the says you, the outta my way, sweetheart, take on things I feel revulsion.  I am convinced as many more qualified to comment than I that there is so deep seated a misogyny in this country that a woman candidate is more hated than a black male candidate.  Read Elaine Showalter in the current Times Literary Supplement.  But enough of all this.  Last night I went with a friend up to New College, the elite, honors college of the Florida public university system to hear a performance of Arnold Schoenberg's legendary 1912 masterpiece Pierrot Lunaire.  Coincidentally the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra is playing Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps this weekend.  It was composed in 1913 so that is a easy point of comparison, and as we all know the first performance was a scandal, the audience was half disgusted and there were arguments and fisticuffs.  Somehow that has all settled down, and Stravinsky's piece is a "classic."  I have to say that the Schoenberg piece may be a classic in certain musical circles but its harshness remains for me an enormous barrier to easy listening.  But musical purists will scream " who the hell wants 'easy listening?'  I do, just as I have grown able to absorb the notes of other pieces of originally unfamiliar or difficult music.  I cannot get past the harsh shrieking.  I guess am a simpleton from Iowa and will remain one. But wait a minute" I have absorbed Picasso easily enough over the years, so maybe it's Schoenberg's problem. Still it was a wonderful evening, what I heard is still in my ears, and I was engaged in being one of an audience of serious listeners.  There was even one young man in the audience with the oh so fashionable only lightly shaved sort of blue beard chin wearing a dress to no one's distress (my companion, a local academic, said: "You see that all the time now.")