A CURE FOR MILDEW - 'The Donkey Show' - psychological impact of pop music

Commonweal, Feb 25, 2000 by Celia Wren

Shakespeare's disco roots? The hidden connection between Schopenhauer and mildew? Let me explain.

Over the past few months, I have managed to acquire a compendium of the disco era's greatest hits, a five-CD retrospective of '80s pop tunes, one seminal Madonna album, and Michael Jackson's Thriller, a release that erupted like Vesuvius over my early high school years. Now please do not assume, on reading this confession, that I like any of this stuff. Absolutely not. I am a classical music person, a Puccini junkie, a lover of pre-Bach and post-Beethoven harmonies. When I'm feeling lowbrow, I indulge in rock music of a dignified, rough-diamond cut-say, Eric Clapton.

So if I hoard airbrained pop tunes, it is for purely practical reasons. The fact is, when I am feeling depressed or lethargic, a bar or two of hyperpeppy music jolts through me like an electric current, provoking me to turn on my computer, or pick up a mop, or buckle down to any number of long procrastinated tasks. Many a piece of prose, and many a mildew- free shower tile, is due entirely to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, turned down low so the neighbors can't hear. The motivating power of synthesizer chords and overactive drum beats is so reliable, in fact, that I have come to rate pop-music costs as business expenses, just as necessary as the outlay for an ergonomic keyboard.

Now, most of the planet's inhabitants plow through their work without the aid of Madonna's "Material Girl" or the Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," so there is obviously something idiosyncratic in my hit-tune dependency. Still, my guilty habit does point to a broader, more interesting phenomenon: namely, the peculiarly visceral impact that music can have on us. Whether or not it is true, as some thinkers have speculated, that the rhythms of our bodies (breathing, heartbeat) make us particularly susceptible to meter and tempo, it is certain that listening to music can be like mainlining emotion. It is for this reason that filmmakers insinuate tunes into the fabric of movies, manipulating our feelings in a way that theater directors have, increasingly, begun to emulate. (For a reminder of how greatly soundtracks sway our cinematic response, watch a very early suspense movie and notice how curiously flat key scenes can be without disquieting music to tense them up.)

But even when music isn't prodding our mood in one direction or another, it tempers the quality of the moment, making even banal experience seem more significant. Schopenhauer, who worked this truth into his abstruse theory of the Will, observed that "suitable music played to any event or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate commentary upon it." This property is immensely reassuring in a world that can seem too confused or tedious or futile to have any meaning at all-think of those minutes spent waiting for a bus, or trying to change the ink cartridge on a fax machine, or scrubbing away at that mildew that will resume its conquest of the tile the moment you walk away.

In his lucid primer Music and the Mind, Anthony Storr gives Schopenhauer's point a slightly different emphasis, observing that music makes us feel as if we are living more intensely. Life is short-you can feel it slipping away while you scrabble at the fax machine's innards, ink cartridge in hand. But if "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini" is lilting through the room, the minutes no longer feel wasted; a shallow experience acquires a little more depth.

Radio stations capitalize on this fact when they marshal up a type of programming in which I particularly delight-the so-called "Countdown" of greatest hits. Whether it is the race to the "New World Symphony," on a classical frequency, or the inexorable advance through rock favorites toward Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"-Top Bands of the Millennium, Top Conductors of All Time, you name it, I am a pushover for the entire category. (Last Labor Day, when I was particularly glum, I even listened to a Top 40 station's 100 Best Songs of the '90s, the musical equivalent of those plastic noodles that come in packing boxes.) The thrill of countdowns extends beyond pleasure in the sounds themselves. Suspense is hardly involved-after all, no one expects Rameau to pull ahead like a Derby long shot and nose out Beethoven. But the ascent from notch to notch seems to whet the edge of experience, and one can't but feel, if I may use Schopenhauer's term, that the Ultimate Secret Meaning hovers at number 1. Countdown euphoria anticipates revelation.

Nietzsche, who quoted Schopenhauer's music-related comments at great length in The Birth of Tragedy, suggested that this revelation would be the transcendence of the self. "Music alone allows us to understand the delight felt at the annihilation of the individual," he wrote, exercising his theory that music's "Dionysiac quintessence" lures us toward a kind of ecstasy and cosmic oneness.

Nietzsche would have liked my CD collection, I thought the other day, when I wandered into a stage extravaganza that might have been crafted specifically to give me my pop music fix. The ingenious interactive play The Donkey Show: A Midsummer Night's Disco, created and directed by Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, retells Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream through disco gems like "We Are Family." Helena (Jordin Ruderman) lip-syncs "Don't Leave Me This Way," as Demetrius (Emily Hellstrom) flees through the forest; Titania (Anna Wilson), clad in nothing but thigh-high patent leather boots and a bikini bottom, plus plastic butterflies perched on her breasts, croons "I Love the Nightlife" as male fairies, their bare torsos smeared with glitter, carry her around the theater-currently, New York's Club El Flamingo, set up as a real discotheque, complete with DJ and glittery disco balls. No distance separates the audience from the actors, who mill on the dance floor in the thick of the crowd.