The Symphony of Life
Everything is silent. Not a word is spoken, not a cough is heard. The conductor raises his arms, and in a flash of a second, he abruptly points to the violinists to begin. The music of Beethoven's Fifth streams out to the crowd sitting in front of the orchestra, taking concentrated listeners to another realm beyond their immediate existence. Their souls leave their bodies, touching a higher dimension where only uncompromising love may dwell. They have reached immortality.
Classical music is a gift from the most genius composers, to bless humankind with art that celebrates life itself in all of its grandeur, as well as despair. If one visits a classical concert, one pays close attention to how it is performed: a large number of musicians, each with his or her special skill and function within the performance as a whole, and a conductor, whose role is to lead the musicians into victory. If someone plays too low, he raises the key. If someone plays too wild or high, he brings him or her down to Earth. If someone lags behind in tempo, the conductor points at the musician and gives a notice with his expression: "You have to raise the pace, or else you'll ruin the experience for all of us."
One can see an orchestra as a metaphor for a society or a collective of individuals: each and one of us carry a different set of abilities and specializations. Some people will never become musicians; others will evolve into geniuses before they reach puberty.  Only the absolute best get the chance of playing in a high-ranking symphony orchestra. Each musician has a set of notes to follow, but the job is not to follow the individual notes, but to become one with the orchestra as a whole and reach a unity to express the symphony in its entirety. In fact, many conductors would have you fired, if you only kept to the notes; a musician plays with feeling and intuition, not by mechanic learning. The notes, both for the musicians and the conductor, are seen as guidelines - the rest is up to interpretation. Some fail to express the ideas and feelings behind a work; others perform it with elegance and creativity.
The conductor symbolizes the leader in society, which organizes all work and sees to it that the collective reach success. In Democratic societies, musicians are told they are "equal," thus can play "their own song" with any instrument they like. Of course, that makes for a horrible listening experience; imagine the violinists and the brass players switching place, because one side want to be "Left" and the other "Right." Similarly, imagine an oboe player trying to take the position of a conductor; very few people have the intelligence, the passion, and the deep understanding of a musical work as advanced as Beethoven's Fifth, to become a conductor - even less experience and ability to lead an entire orchestra.
Fascist, National Socialist, caste, and meritocratic societies are all built around the same concept: individuals are not "equal" but different, and therefore it makes sense to create a position in society for each individual ability, so that the highest result possible is achieved: consensus, and thus, art. Democratic societies, inherently led by people that cannot create civilizations, eventually perform so much ill-sounding music due to internal conflicts, that they end up destroying their own society and leaving only a pile of ash behind. Underneath, the immortal works of Beethoven lie scattered, waiting for a new dawn when they may experience a new performance, in a time when genius is recognized and preserved, for the benefit of all mankind.
by Alex Birch
April 11, 2007
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