Classical music and golf

Tiger Woods, meet Beethoven,
Or: Why music is like a golf course

DAN COREN

The Inquirer recently reported that Tiger Woods is starting on the design of a new golf course. Woods “wants to let the scenic land dictate the layout and hopes the course gives golfers a fair test and a chance to connect with nature,” the story said.

I’m sure Woods hopes to give golfers a uniquely satisfying experience of the mountains of North Carolina. Of course it wouldn’t occur to Woods to state the obvious: that in all its essentials his new course will be just like hundreds and hundreds of others: It will have 18 holes and the standard set of hazards (sand traps, ponds, and graduated roughs along the side of the fairways). Moreover, each hole will end in a little plateau of manicured lawn with a flagstick marking the hole. In fact, if Woods had even mentioned these points, his listeners would have begun edging away from him nervously.

This assumption of an underlying set of rules and conventions too obvious to mention makes Woods, like all golfers, a Classicist (albeit an unwitting one). He is to golf what Beethoven was to the Classical style in music. Woods’s Haydn and Mozart were the likes of Nicklaus and Palmer. Just as Beethoven permanently altered the way society perceives music, Woods, with his blend of sheer power and almost supernatural talent, has revolutionized our relationship to golf. But also— again, as with Beethoven— the game itself has remained sacred and immutable.

The unwritten rules of the game

If you want to know the rules of golf, you can find them with a few keystrokes on the Internet. On the other hand, while it’s clear from the empirical evidence of hundreds upon hundreds of symphonies, sonatas, quartets, trios, etc., that Mozart and Haydn carried something like “The Official Rule Book of Classical Form” in their heads, neither they nor their contemporaries ever seem to have discussed it.

Some of these rules are obvious. For example, a symphony, the rulebook apparently says, must have four movements (once in a great while, an exception would be granted to leave one out)– four separate pieces, the first fast, the second slow, the third a stylized dance in triple time, and the fourth fast again. Others are not so easy to explain in lay terms (although I’m going to try as we go along).

It’s been my experience, though, that only when you get beyond the superficial and start to listen carefully do you begin to realize how consistent the game of Classical music really was even at the level of little details. The conceptual sameness of, say, the Mozart Symphonies 36, 38, 39, 40, and 41; of Haydn’s last 20 or so symphonies; and of all the Beethoven symphonies is simply staggering.

The great unanswered musicological question

Equally staggering is the collective silence of these composers. It remains, for me, one of the greatest unanswered musicological questions, the missing dark matter in the universe of music history. Perhaps it’s because Haydn and Mozart regarded their procedural rules the same way Tiger Woods regards the rules of golf– almost as unconsciously as we regard oxygen.

In any event, it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to say that a symphony by one of these composers is like a golf course for the mind. And in their music, as in golf, it’s not the similarities but the unique qualities of the individual creations that give us so much pleasure today.

Same rules, different terrains

The “Amen Corner” in Augusta and the toughest par-five at St. Andrew’s in Scotland— two wildly different kinds of terrain— are both inexhaustible sources of creativity and entertainment. Similarly, the beauty of the Classical style lies in how the same underlying set of rules can produce such wildly different musical terrains as, for example, the Beethoven Third and the Mozart 39th Symphonies.

To extend this simile just a little further, the classical repertory also contains plenty of pitch-and-putt pieces. The likes of Dittersdorf couldn’t do any better, but the great composers wrote their share as well. But when they wrote pieces worthy of the Classical Music Professional Tour, they indicated the seriousness of their intention by using– surprise!– sonata-form. If you come to understand how it works, you get to the heart of the great musical game Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and, later, Brahms, never exhausted.

The only way to appreciate sonata-form is to deal with it directly. If you’re so inclined, follow this link.



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