Resize Text: 
When I began my studies with Bulent Arel, I was fresh from my home in southern Arkansas. At that time classical music was to me the work of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Schubert, and all the other familiar pre-20th-century composers. I found the music of the 20th century deeply disturbing. The Bartók string quartets gave me a headache, and music as recent as, say, early Stockhausen struck me as solid proof that the emperor—20th-century “classical” music—was in fact naked. What I considered to be stridently dissonant, atonal crap was making fools of its audience.
Harlow Stewart Sanders is a former professional drummer, a former high school English teacher, and currently a 4th-year PhD student in English education at the University of Missouri, Columbia. His research focuses on the cognitive advantages of teaching English literature in the context of the other contemporaneous arts, primarily painting and music.
Become a Subscriber