I’m a relatively new Taylor Swift fan. I remember the night it happened, at the Midnight Sun, a gay bar in the Castro, San Francisco. She had just released “Look What You Made Me Do”, the lead single off her new album Reputation, and the bar was playing the music video on its big screen. As I watched different versions of Taylor fight herself, an earlier incarnation getting a boot to the face, followed by each of them lobbing criticisms at each other, I realized this was no vapid pop star. This was a self-aware artist, worthy of understanding and study. After all, the true measure of a person is not how they are when they’re successful, but rather how they react, cope, and forge ahead in the face of adversity.
I also quickly learned that being a Swiftie came with its own set of challenges as I had to defend my musical tastes against critics. Luckily my background in classical music made that easier; my great obsession with Mozart shut them up. The rarefied world of Mozart’s piano sonatas and concertos was ample defense against those who said liking Taylor’s music was “basic” or “uneducated”. But the fact that I needed to justify myself is a nod to the type of hate her fans receive.
How much do I love Mozart? I once complained to Spotify because the duration of the second movement of K.242, Mozart’s seventh piano concerto, his first for two pianos, was incorrect. It ended early, by about 10 seconds, which is unacceptable since it contained a playful musical wink with a piano flourish after where the orchestra normally ends the movement. And this was from the Philips Complete Edition of Mozart, meant to be a definitive recording of all his works. Their response? “We’ve taken a look at the song in question and it worked perfectly fine until the end when we tried to play it.” Followed by instructions on how to reinstall. Though that exchange was of no help (I immediately checked and the piece still ended 10 seconds early), they eventually fixed it, to my delight.
Though we view Mozart’s music as part of the classical repertoire now, people often forget that when it was written, it was pop music. These pieces were meant to entertain, to showcase Mozart’s talent as a pianist and composer, and hopefully gain him commissions for more pieces — concepts that still power the current music industry. Nowadays the pieces are shorter, but the essence is still the same. Write catchy bops that people want to hear more of. Write music that we’re comfortable with, but make it new. Push the boundaries of music while still making it pleasant to listen to.
The more I defended myself, the more I saw parallels in both these artists, in both their music and lives. While we have collections of Mozart’s letters and a fantastic biography by Maynard Solomon, the private life of Taylor Swift is much less open to scrutiny, despite the attempts of tabloids. That is, until January, when Miss Americana was released on Netflix.
Miss Americana is a documentary on Taylor Swift, focused mainly on her life between the releases of Reputation and Lover, the latter being her newest album. In it, we’re presented with a rare look inside Taylor’s world and day-to-day life, including stadium concerts, PR team meetings, recording studio sessions, and meals on private jets. And though most of us can relate to none of that, in it we also see a woman maturing and taking control of her life, using her voice and reach to champion issues that are important to her.
Before we dive in, we ought to consider authenticity in a documentary. Despite the film’s message of an individual battling incumbent forces, Taylor does have a tour coming up in the summer, and the flurry of marketing, promotions, and music video releases is in full force. Miss Americana is a part of that force. We also need to question how authentic someone is when they know they’re being recorded. Does she really mean it? Is it all an act? Is this the true Taylor Swift? To which I say, You Need to Calm Down. I don’t know. She’s had so many cameras pointed at her for so long, perhaps she’s inured to them at this point and is comfortable being herself around the lenses. And it does seem that Taylor, in her conversations in the film, is more authentic and vulnerable than she is in her acting roles. It’s said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” I believe Taylor here. And regardless of truth or not, her recently released music is more politically and socially charged, and the message within the music videos is clear. Women’s rights, gay rights, and a whole lotta pastel.
Similarly, with Mozart, we can only extrapolate his personality and struggles through his letters, contemporary accounts, and of course, through his music. The Magic Flute is an opera steeped in Freemason concepts, Mozart himself being a member. This same person also wrote “Leck mich im Arsch” (Lick My Ass), a canon for 6 voices, and his scatological humor extended to his letters, so there’s that. He was also forward with his praise and criticisms of other’s musical talents and tastes, and since many of his letters were addressed to his father, we can guess that their close relationship engendered some honesty. Whereas Taylor has only recently become vocal about her stances, Mozart has always been blunter: “If only the French sopranos wouldn’t sing Italian arias; I would forgive them their screeching in French, but to ruin good Musick! — it’s unbearable.”[1]
On Music:
Taylor’s music, and the great majority of Mozart’s, is formulaic. In modern pop we have terms like pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, verse, intro, outro. In the Sonata form, we have exposition, development, recapitulation, or more simply, theme A, B, A. As listeners of both these forms, we know what to expect. The exciting part of any song or piece is how we’re going to get there.
What Taylor and Mozart both do well is write great hooks; that catchy part of the piece, the first phrase you think of when someone mentions a song. In Taylor’s case, it’s often the song title. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. Did you sing it in your mind? “I Know Places”, “ME!”, “Look What You Made Me Do” — each of these songs has an earworm that has infiltrated my mind in the past, one I can’t remove until I listen to it. As for Mozart, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is based off a piano piece with 12 variations (K.265); the first few notes of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (K.525) are universally recognizable, and who could forget the Queen of the Night’s dramatic aria in Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, K.620)? Even though the hook is only made of a few notes, its placement in a song and its ability to lodge itself in the brain is the hallmark of a good composer. In fact, Taylor has been criticized for it, with the critic saying, “We need more songs, man. Fucking songs, not hooks.” Which reeks of jealousy. Taylor’s songs are complete; it’s just her hooks are more memorable than most.
But the artistry in both Mozart’s and Taylor’s music is that it doesn’t demand the listener to listen. I’ve heard Eine kleine Nachtmusik at least a dozen times in different movies, always the background to some party where waiters wander around with hors d’oeuvres and champagne. And though less glamorous, I’ve heard Taylor’s Fifteen while buying groceries and Delicate while at the gym. Contrast this with Beethoven and heavy metal, respectively. Beethoven’s grand orchestrations, the whole and broken octaves he uses in his piano pieces — the sheer sonic power of his compositions demands the listener to listen. Heavy metal has a similar effect with loud instruments and voices. They need you to listen. But with Mozart and Swift, the music is there, but it isn’t intrusive. Yet should one choose to listen, they’ll find complexity and depth underneath the neat, glossy surface.
This becomes clearer when I play Mozart’s piano works. “A musician’s musician” as Tobias Möller once called him, Mozart’s works fit the pianist’s hands perfectly. Scales, leaps, cadenzas — all glide gracefully up and down the keyboard with ten fingers. Mozart asks for precision and control in each of the digits, but doesn’t force the hand and wrists into awkward positions, nor does he require the pianist to play with force enough to bleed. In the first movement of his piano sonatas, he’ll give me a theme. And when I play it again, near the end, it’s the same theme, but with a twist, often in the form of octaves, a chromatic scale, or fifths. The twist can be so small that a passive listener wouldn’t notice. In fact, any passing background noise could easily drown it out, as it often appears for only a measure. That piece I complained to Spotify about cut that wink out by ending early. But when I play Mozart’s music, I recognize that little wink across centuries. Mozart didn’t need to put it in, but he did. He could’ve ended it the same way he started, but he chose a new way to get us to the end of the piece, and it’s that attention to detail and playfulness that makes his music that much more enchanting.
In Taylor’s case, she does something similar with lyrics, music, or sometimes a combination of both. In her song “Enchanted”, the bridge (starting at 4:25), introduces a simple motif. As the name of the term implies, the bridge is normally used to get us from one chorus to another and doesn’t appear again. But in this song, it gets repeated at the very end. In fact, it’s so faint that I missed it during my first few listens. The first clue of its existence comes in the outro, where the bridge lyrics are repeated. Working backwards, when I listened closely to the end of the song, I found that both the bridge melody and lyrics were repeated, layered on top of the already ongoing chorus; an impressive feat.[2] Knowing how subtle this detail is, and how easily missable it is even after hearing the song multiple times, I’m curious if she intended for others to notice it, added it to round out the last chorus, or just liked those lyrics and wanted to repeat them again. Either way, she had no need to add this extra detail, but she did. This isn’t throwaway pop music designed to make a quick buck; the intimate nature of her lyrics and the attention paid to the craft give the music heart.
It’s this unexpected within the expected, a different path from the easy and visible way out, that adds to the joy of listening to their music.
An example where she does this only with lyrics appears on the Red song, “I Almost Do”. The first verse ends with “I bet sometimes you wonder about me,” while 4 minutes later the whole song ends with, “I hope sometimes you wonder about me.” This one change, from ‘bet’ to ‘hope’, encapsulates the emotional trajectory of the lyrics, like a cherry of feeling on top, bringing the song to a neat close. What seemed at first clinical and standoffish eventually gives way to nostalgia for a lost love. In this regard, Taylor has the advantage because she writes both the music and lyrics. Mozart had librettists for his operas, both in Italian and German, and there is often a disconnect between the lyrics and the music they’re set to. In Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio), the demanding aria “Martern aller Artern” (Tortures of All Kinds) is set to a happy C-major, and even in the passages where the soprano sings “Death will liberate me in the end!”, it’s all major scales going up and down. Vivacious and dramatic, yes, but it isn’t until his later operas where the tone and key of music start matching the lyrics.
We are blessed to have audio recordings today, but in Mozart’s time there were only ever live performances, when music was solely the creation of a group of people coming together to create sound from silence. And by all accounts, he was a phenomenal pianist. There’s a moment in a piano concerto, near the end of the movement, when the orchestra plays a sustained note and then goes quiet. The soloist then launches into the cadenza, a chance for them to shine. They can play whatever they want, for however long they want; they’ll end their solo with an extended trill signaling for the orchestra to return so everyone can finish the piece together. These cadenzas were most often improvised, and Mozart didn’t always leave music for the soloist to play. Thankfully he wrote a few down so we can see what one might’ve sounded like, and when he didn’t, other composers supplied their own, like the ones Beethoven wrote for Mozart’s 20th piano concerto (K.466).
But music has changed in the past 250 years. Live means less when there is a way to record and reproduce sound at a quality that rivals or even surpasses live performances. Music production, once the realm of the conductor, can be finely tuned on a computer. Similarly, perfect beats, electronic instruments and sounds, isolated then redoubled vocals — all are possible with technology. And Taylor and her producers use these tools to craft the polished music we hear on the radio. But to Taylor’s credit, she still performs live. During the Reputation Tour, I was lucky enough to have a front row view of her performing “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”. What was normally a slick electronic pop number with reverb became an intimate piece, almost a ballad, when it was just her and her guitar. Her facial expressions as she sang, the way she wielded the guitar, as if it were both sword and shield — these are things that are only visible during a live performance. During the stadium tour, she also played another song with only her voice and guitar; on the night I saw her it was Wildest Dreams, but the songs changed from place to place, night to night. These ‘surprise’ songs were all her playing solo, a lucky break for the band. But this dedication to live performance not only showcased her sizable discography, but also her abilities as a musician.
This feat of performing live is made even more impressive when one takes into account her narrower vocal range. Especially when I hear the songs as they’re being made, such as in the voice memos at the end of 1989, I’m surprised by how polished her live vocals are in comparison. It’s clear she works hard to perfect her voice, and perhaps more importantly, she writes for her own voice, so the music and lyrics fit well together and are synthesized into an organic whole. She prudently avoids long sustains and passages requiring vibrato, opting for tongue twisters and rapid-fire lyrics. And the hidden boon in all this is that it also makes her songs eminently sing-alongable, adding to their mass appeal.
On Life:
Miss Americana touches on the number of songs she’s written.
“I’m only here because I work hard and I’m nice to people. That work ethic, like…Thank God I had that work ethic. I can’t change what’s gonna happen to me, but I can control what I write.” (19:30)
With 7 studio albums and over 130 songs, all written by her, her output is prodigious. And yeah, not all of them are good; Mozart had some stinkers too, but both of their established reputations are based on the sheer number of hits they each wrote in their flurry of work. Those K. numbers I’ve been using — the K stands for Köchel, the chronological catalog of all of Mozart’s known works. The number goes up to K.626, the Requiem being the last piece Mozart wrote as he died.
K.1 his first composition, was for the keyboard, written when he was 5. Recognizing his son’s talent, Leopold Mozart took his son touring Europe, performing for royal courts and aristocracy. I’m not sure how old she was at the time, but Miss Americana shows a young Taylor losing it when she receives a guitar for Christmas. We’re also shown home video footage of her performing at home, then performing on a small stage, asking the audience to request the song “Tim McGraw” on a local radio station. Though hers is a household name now, it’s refreshing to see her humbler origins. Scott and Andrea, Taylor’s parents, also moved from Pennsylvania to Tennessee to support her budding music career, and perhaps they recognized something in their daughter the same way Leopold realized Wolfgang’s own talents as a musician.
Mozart’s music remains inimitable because of its complexity and balance, that perfect melding of mathematical precision and humanity. Taylor’s remains inimitable because, “In ways both subtle and obtuse, she makes sure that all of her songs belong to her. There’s a reason there aren’t many Taylor Swift covers — as Swift told NPR in 2014, through her lyrics, ‘People have essentially gotten to read my diary for the last 10 years.’ It’s pretty hard to cover someone else’s diary.”[3]
And as much as I wanted to separate this essay into parallels first in music and then in life, I realized I couldn’t, because for these two artists, the music they create is a reflection of their lives. Most of Mozart’s pieces were in the major; happy and bright, designed to entertain and please. But on those rare occasions he wrote in the minor, he hinted at the emotion and turmoil that would be expressed in the Romantic period. For example, C-major is for jubilant and bright works with trumpets and drums (e.g. the 25th piano concerto (K.503) and the Jupiter Symphony (K.551)), while C-minor was the key chosen for some of his most groundbreaking piano work (e.g. the 24th piano concerto (K.491) and the Fantasia in C-minor (K.475)).
The Piano Sonata in A-minor (K.310), his first and one of only two minor piano sonatas, was written during the death of Mozart’s mother during their trip to Paris in 1778. She fell ill, and then 2 weeks later, she was gone. The sonata is one of anguish and pain, the first movement violent and forceful with repeated block chords, a departure from his earlier work. The second movement is tender, and seems to almost forgive, until it launches into wild octaves and I need to use my thumb to smash multiple keys, feeling barbaric yet satisfied in a stroke of Mozart’s crude brilliance. And right after, just like that, the music pretends like nothing happened, returning to the tender melody from before. And the last movement is a frenetic presto, with the left hand trading the melodic line back and forth with the right hand in a calculated confusion, and it abruptly ends with those block chords, similar to the ones in the beginning. When I’m finished playing, I feel a hollow catharsis in its wake. Playing the piece doesn’t make me feel better, but it expresses the sadness, anger, and grief of loss.
Taylor may be best known for her breakup songs, but perhaps that’s too narrow a view. I’d suggest that, instead, she writes songs of emotion. The mental turmoil left in the aftermath of a split are some of the most powerful and confusing emotions I’ve personally felt, and her breakup songs do a good job of capturing the whole mess. The high, barely controlled screams in “I Knew You Were Trouble” have been covered by goats, and in our pain, most likely in the car, haven’t we screamed them too? The chaotic and turbulent nature of the emotion is captured in the lyrics and production. A pulsing guitar is doubled by the bass, the drum picks up speed, a moment of silence, and then the dubstep entrance with that Ahhh! reflects the sudden onset of both desire and regret. However, the song right after it, “All Too Well”, uses fewer instruments, probably playable by a three-piece band of drummer, bassist, and Taylor doing vocals and guitar. And that works for the plaintive nature of the song, which is more distanced from the breakup itself, reflecting on how it was only years later. So, if Taylor is in a stable relationship, it’ll be reflected in the music she creates. Lover, both the track and quite a bit of the album, has an older, nostalgic feeling due to the instrumentation and rhythms, most prevalent in the song “Paper Rings”. This calmer version of Taylor is reflected in the simpler production of the album’s music, especially compared to the heavy industrial beats of Reputation. There’ll be enough inevitable tragedy in our lives, even in the lives of celebrities, and as a fan, I appreciate the happier output as well.
That is not to say, however, that she has lost the fire behind her craft. Rather than turn inward, her songs have begun to address the issues that are shaping social discourse in the early 21st century. By the very nature of her music, her private life has become public, and perhaps she can use that to change the public itself. In the documentary, she hints at a version of her future:
“It’s a lot to process because we do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35. Everyone’s a shiny new toy for like, two years. The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20 times more than the male artists. They have to, or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny. Be new to us, be young to us, but only in a new way and only in the way we want. And reinvent yourself, but only in a way that we find to be equally comforting but also a challenge for you. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable. This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success. So, I don’t know, like, as I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” (1:10:00 ish)
As much as I wanted to pull more parallels from Mozart’s life, to see if there was something I could tease out of musicians across time, the unfortunate fact is he died when he was 35. He had his own share of enemies, detractors, and problems, but he overcame those by writing ever greater music. Perhaps around K.271 [4], the 9th piano concerto, he had come to fully understand the rules of court music, and began playing with those rules, pushing them, and eventually molding whole new sets of rules for his own music, especially after he became familiar with J.S. Bach’s music. And Mozart’s great weakness, which Taylor does not share, was money. Constantly in debt, he lived a lavish lifestyle but ended up borrowing to pay those debts. The great success of his final opera allowed him to somewhat recover financially, but in December 1791 he died, with rheumatic fever being the main proposed reason.
Miss Americana was eye-opening in another way, and that was seeing what bothered Taylor. From my position, as far removed from celebrity as possible, it was surprising to see how this superstar still cared about some things.
Grammy Nomination Day 2018
Woman on phone: “Because right now, um, in the main…the big categories of album, record, song…um, you are not nominated.”
Taylor: “Uh, okay, it’s — it’s, um…This is good. This is fine. You know what? Like, this is fine. This is…I just need to make a better record.”
WOP: “Well, Reputation is a great record.”
Taylor: “No, I’m making…I’m making a better record.” (6:55)
Since then, the Grammys have been rocked by its own scandals and controversies, which is true of any organization made up of people with competing egos, agendas, and opinions. And more importantly, she’s already won the awards:
“I had won Album of the Year at the Grammys for a second time, which I never thought was a possibility. And I remembered thinking afterward…Oh my God that was all you wanted, Oh, God, that was all you wanted. That was all you focused on. You get to the mountaintop and you look around, and you’re like, ‘Oh God. W-What now?’” (21:45)
If I may, I’d like to suggest an answer. Taylor has made enough money for the music industry with her chart-topping hits. She’s flush from her rightfully deserved success, and that gives her the freedom to write and sing whatever the hell she wants, in whichever genre she wants. A songwriter with her talent has the ability to shape the future of pop music, critics be damned, and that’s what I’d love to see her do. Her ability to shift from country to pop hints at a deeper understanding of the universality of music, and that ability particularly shines in the rare glimpses we have of her studio sessions. Especially in today’s social climate, where we view and judge artists not only by their work, but by who they are as a person (e.g. Kevin Spacey) — Taylor is in a position to benefit from that because of how intertwined her music is with her personal life.
So Dear Taylor, you’ve won the awards. You’ve reached peak success as defined by our current society. Now go and change music, the way Mozart did. You don’t need to write for a machine that demands it of you. Because in the end, it’s still about the music. Write the amazing music I know you do because music expresses something inside you in a way that no other medium can. And, um, maybe throw a ticket my way to the Lover concert?
Love,
Jon
[1] Spaething, Robert. Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life. W. W. Norton Company, 2005. p 148
[2] “All You Had To Do Was Stay” does something similar, where the bridge melody is repeated near the end of the song for extra oomph. However, it’s only repeated 1.5 times, while Mozart’s compositions resolve these symmetries completely.
[3] Donnella, Leah. “Taylor Swift Is The 21st Century’s Most Disorienting Pop Star.” NPR, NPR, 26 Sept. 2018, www.npr.org/2018/09/26/646422866/taylor-swift-is-the-21st-centurys-most-disorienting-pop-star.
[4] Charles Rosen dedicated a large chunk of his Mozart chapter to this concerto in the fantastic The Classical Style.