That's how you get that way

On the way to the store yesterday, I heard something on the radio for orchestra and extremely bombastic piano that sounded like a Rhapsody in Blue knock-off, and as it came to a noisy conclusion, I was thinking that it was a rather poor imitation of Gershwin.  Then the announcer said it was Gershwin -- Rhapsody No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra. Oh, well, nice try, George.  I don't think I had ever heard that piece before, probably because it isn't famous enough, and it's not famous because it isn't very good.

There are levels of fame for works of music.  At one end are real esoteric things famous among music scholars (like L'homme Arme masses) and on the other you have the Top 40 Smash Hits of Classical Music, stuff that even my Aunt Blanche knows -- Scheherazade, Beethoven's Fifth, the Hallelujah Chorus, Peer Gynt Suite, things like that.

Those pieces well known to almost everybody got famous because they are very good, although I admit that there was a time when I sometimes tended to dismiss them as beneath the attention of a serious music scholar.  Actually, Scheherazade was one of those to which I gave little attention or credit until the university orchestra, of which I was a member, performed it.  During rehearsals, while I hung out in the percussion section waiting for it to be my turn to bang on something, I had an opportunity to listen, really listen, to it and its parts, and I gained a serious appreciation of it.

So I learned a lesson.  And did it make me change my ways and stop being a music snob?  Of course not.  (Remember my story about going to Barnes & Noble to buy a CD of Johann Herrmann Schein?)