Why You Shouldn't Listen to Adagios

It's never a good idea to listen to adagios, I mean just adagios without the buffeting effect of the surrounding andantes and allegros. I know that, but I still bought a CD of just adagios, and I occasionally listen to it and wish I didn't. I know people think they are supposed to be comforting, but just by themselves, it's never a good idea.

In the first place, adagios are meant to be heard with the entire composition. It's like pulling the bridges out of your favorite pop tunes and listening to them one right after the other without the rest of the songs. It's like just eating an Oreo cookie without the filling. In the second place, when played one after another, they are simply depressing. They don't comfort. They oppress. They deplete the spirit, and without the uplifting benefit of their surrounding parts, you've got no place to go but flat on the floor. You're just asking for the fetal position, and you're destined to eat Kraft macaroni and cheese straight from the pan while standing over the stove with a big wooden spoon. Oh, sigh.

Here's an example. When I was in college, I enrolled in summer school to avoid having to go home to what I felt was an oppressive house. I preferred the classroom. Because the women's dorm was being painted that summer, the students were moved to another dorm building that had once been a nursing home. I am pretty sure my room was possessed by the spirit of a patient who died in that elevated bed while staring blankly at a cup of ice chips sitting on the little table that went up and down with a hand crank.

I settled in for the summer, and my room mate and I set up a record player stacked with our small collection. We had just bought an album called The Greatest Hits of 1720. I'm not kidding. There really is such an album, and it's filled with things like Pachelbel's Canon and Bach minuets. There are also a few adagios taken out of context--on side B is Albinoni's Adagio for Violin, Strings, and Organ. Oh, dear God. I don't know what possessed me, other than the spirit of the depressed nursing home patient, but it wasn't uncommon for me to pick the needle up from the album at the end of the piece and set down at the beginning of the thing over and over again.

Finally, my roommate and I went to the drug store on the corner and bought a pocket knife and a family-sized pack of giant Ivory soap bars. We sat at our elevated tables, listening to those blasted spirit dredging adagios, and carved little animals and objects out of soap. We lined the window sill with our menagerie, and we slipped into a state of mental and emotional oblivion. The only effective antidote was to skip class and spend our days at the beach on Oak Street, sipping Slurpies from the 7/11 and smoking clove cigarettes. So much for summer school. I would have been better off at home with the bright orange flowered sofas and the used toothpicks on the end tables.

So, adagios, out of context, are bad. The next time you find a CD that makes you think they're good, remember the soap bears and foxes and kittens and buy the entire symphony instead.