and listen for younger voices. Following my distinguished predecessors Andrew Porter and Paul Griffiths, I’ve maintained that modern composers deserve the same lavish treatment that is given to canonical masters—a conviction that led to my first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. I’ve also periodically detoured into pop and rock, although, having grown up in classical music, I feel unsure of my footing outside it. In all, I approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world.
Listen to This combines various New Yorker articles, several of them substantially revised, with one long piece written for the occasion. The book begins with three aerial surveys of the musical landscape, encompassing both classical and pop terrain. The first chapter, from which the title comes, began as a preface to The Rest Is Noise, although I soon realized that it had to be a freestanding essay. It is a kind of memoir turned manifesto, and when it was published it elicited an unexpectedly strong response from readers, with hundreds of letters and e-mails arriving over several months. Many of these messages came from music students and recent conservatory graduates who were struggling to reconcile the grand tradition in which they had been schooled with the pop culture in which they had come of age. The intense frustration that they and I feel in the face of the pince-nez stereotype of classical music runs throughout the book. The second chapter, “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues,” is the new thing—a whirlwind history of music told through two or three recurring bass lines. “Infernal Machines” brings together various thoughts on the intersection of music and technology.
With a rough map in place, I follow the traces of a dozen or so musicians living and dead: composers, conductors, pianists, string quartets, rock bands, singer-songwriters, high-school band teachers. In the final section, I try in a more personal way to describe three radically different figures—Bob Dylan, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Johannes Brahms—who touch on things almost too deep for words. My last book unfolded on a big historical canvas, with political forces constantly threatening to overwhelm the solitary voice; this book is more intimate, more local, revisiting many times the abiding question of what music means to its creators and its listeners on the most elemental level. Above all, I want to know how a powerful personality can imprint itself on an inherently abstract medium—how a brief sequence of notes or chords can take on the recognizable quirks of a person close at hand.
Maybe the only trait these musically possessed men and women have in common is that they are unlike one another or anyone else. Many are exiles, wanderers, restless searchers. A shy avant-garde Finn becomes a Los Angeles celebrity. An Icelandic singer dances her way through the streets of Salvador, Brazil. A Japanese pianist interprets the German repertory in the foothills of Vermont. An elder of rock and roll meanders across the land, deconstructing his hits. A great German composer traverses an inner landscape ravaged by sadness. One way or another, they unsettle whatever genre they inhabit, making the familiar strange.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, in one of its saner moments, defined music as “a specific variant of the sound made by people.” The difficult thing about music writing, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe a human being. It’s tricky work, presumptuous in the case of the living and speculative in the case of the dead. Still, I hope to give a few lingering glimpses of all those sensuous selves.
1 LISTEN TO THIS CROSSING THE BORDER FROM CLASSICAL TO POP
I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. It banishes into limbo the work of thousands of active composers who have to explain to otherwise well-informed people what it is they do for a living. The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name. I envy jazz people who speak simply of “the music.” Some jazz aficionados also call their art “America’s classical music,” and I propose a trade: they can have “classical,” I’ll take “the music.”
For at least a century, the music has been captive to a cult of mediocre elitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority. Consider other names in circulation: “art” music, “serious” music, “great” music, “good” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious, but greatness and seriousness are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane. Composers are artists, not etiquette columnists; they have the right to express any emotion, any state of mind. They have been betrayed by well-meaning acolytes who believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that replaces an inferior popular product. These guardians say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen instead to our great, arty music.” They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. Music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values. The best music is the music that persuades us that there is no other music in the world.
When people hear “classical,” they think “dead.” The music is described in terms of its distance from the present, its difference from the mass. No wonder that stories of its imminent demise are commonplace. Newspapers recite a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible in the media, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. Yet the same story was told forty, sixty, eighty years ago. Stereo Review wrote in 1969, “Fewer classical records are being sold because people are dying … Today’s dying classical market is what it is because fifteen years ago no one attempted to instill a love for classical music in the then impressionable children who have today become the market.” The conductor Alfred Wallenstein wrote in 1950, “The economic crisis confronting the American symphony orchestra is becoming increasingly acute.” The German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt wrote in 1926, “Concerts are poorly attended and budget deficits grow from year to year.” Laments over the decline or death of the art appear as far back as the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of Ars Nova were thought to signal the end of civilization. The pianist Charles Rosen has sagely observed, “The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.”
The American classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes, the audience is older than that for any other art—the median age is forty-nine—but it is not the wealthiest. Musicals, plays, ballet, and museums all get larger slices of the $50,000-or-more income pie (as does the ESPN channel, for that matter). The parterre section at the Metropolitan Opera plays host to CEOs and socialites, but the less expensive parts of the house—as of this writing, most seats in the Family Circle go for twenty-five dollars—are well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. If you want to see an in-your-face, Swiss-bank-account display of wealth, go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show, if security lets you. As for the graying of the audience, there is no denying the general trend, although with any luck it may begin to level off. Paradoxically, even as the audience ages, the performers keep getting younger. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic are, on average, a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.
The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is like an ageless diva on a nonstop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with—not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create—a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender