Today I Appreciate Antonin Dvorak

The day before traveling anywhere always makes me feel anxious. It doesn't matter where I'm going, but I somehow always suspect that something on a plane trip home will go wrong.

I'm returning to UCLA to begin my winter quarter and all day I've been unable to focus on any one task, stay still for long periods of time, or settle my thoughts that keep racing over the same worries. Then, there is that distinctive melancholic feeling of plucking shirts off the hangers in my childhood closet and folding them back into the suitcase for the dreaded plane ride tomorrow, unsure of when I'll return to the comforts and freeing irresponsibility of being home.

Of course, I must remember that while nestling into home is soothing, it's not real life. It's not advancing who I am and it's not necessarily helping me grow. I'm returning to school! University! I'm taking an intensive course load, I write a column every week for the paper, I help run the literary journal, and I'm preparing to teach an undergraduate student-taught course in the Spring. I'll be busy. Exciting, I think?

Yet even with my bipolar feelings about change, there's one man's stable lyricism that calms me through everything: Antonin Dvorak, Romantic composer.

Classical music from the Romantic era is mercifully not the stuff of stiff-collared, wig-wearing European men, but rather is pulsing, alive, emotional, swelling music from the nineteenth century characterized by its attention to building tension and feeling in its melodies and rhythms. Romantic works are complex tangles of music, pulsing into crescendos in an instant then, often just as quickly, settling into soft, graceful lullabies. I often wonder why Romantic music isn't picked up more for movie scores.

Anyway, there are many Romantic composers from whom I could choose (Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert to name a few), but the charm of Dvorak never fades for me. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Dvorak's not a real show-off (my kind of guy. Too bad we're separated by thousands of years and continents). Sure, he creates sweeping stories and runs through the same gamut of rhythmical complexities as his mates, but there's a charm that underlies pieces like his "New World Symphony."

I'm with Dvorak and his orchestra all the way through each movement of each piece, following the story he constructs. The listener discovers whimsy in the musical creation of the "New World." I not only feel the emotions conjured by the melodies, but I also relate myself to the music and become lost in what it emotionally creates for me. It's a distraction - if you will - from the more pressing emotional concerns of my present and takes me to other imaginative parts of my mind and allows me to experience the beauty and joy of experiencing the range of emotions music can create.

Today, then, I appreciate Dvorak for the emotional support his music provides. Thank you.