The Contrapositive of Music
There has been an interesting debate brewing in response to my contention last week that the process of listening uninterruptedly to music is an excellent metaphor for allowing other viewpoints into your life and is therefore an essential experience for a democratic society. One particularly articulate respondent using the moniker Kotch questioned my entire thesis claiming that democracy “means the right to filter out other viewpoints if we chose, not to be forced to listen to them.” To which Ryan Tanaka responded in words I couldn’t have bettered:
Democracy is […] a political process […] where every voice has an opportunity to become heard. It was never intended to give people an excuse to shut themselves up into their own bunker and severe themselves from social ties.
Kotch also took issues with my extolling the concert hall as a great way to hear music:
I see the concert hall as one of classical music’s primary assaults on its listeners, and its potential listeners. Serving to reinforce the self-affirmation of the few who truly feel comfortable in it, the concert hall turns away many more others who might be interested in the music, but not the gray hair, program notes, pristine seats, and static applause. If I never heard a muffled cough or the tense silence between the performers’ stage entrance and the start of a piece again, I’d be thrilled.
It is very perplexing to me that there are many highly intelligent people who eschew concert halls as a transmission mechanism for music. As Gavin Borchert pointed out rather succinctly back in December, going to listen to music in a concert hall isn’t all that different from sitting quietly in a movie theater, which is still an extremely viable experience for a millions of people every day. But perhaps, sadly, listening to music in and of itself just isn’t enough for most folks.
I accept many other listening modalities besides attentive concert hall listening or even listening to a recording at home with much less than complete attention much of the time. It’s the only way to find time to listen to so much music. But ironically when I get excited about the music I hear as I’m taking in a bunch of other stuff at the same time—e.g. music that is a soundtrack to a film, an accompaniment to dinner conversation, or a personal soundtrack as I do other things—the music often completely takes over. I cease following the narrative line of the film, I drop out of the conversation, I stop the other things I’m doing. The experience of the music I’m listening to is just too attention-grabbing and powerful.
In fact, if you really are focused completely on the music you are listening to it can be so all-encompassing that it completely erodes awareness of the passage of time. This is rather bizarre considering that music is a time-based art form. Think about the last time you listened to an amazing performance that lasted half an hour but seemed to fly by in only ten minutes, or, vice versa, a dreadful one that was only ten minutes but felt like an hour. From a purely time-efficient point of view, rewarding listening experiences are an incredible time drain since they take away your time before you’re aware that the time is gone. Despite the people in the classical music industry still reeling over all the folks who ignored Joshua Bell when he played in the DC metro, I’m sure there are times you can remember stopping to listen to a musician playing in a public space, being transfixed by what you were hearing and therefore oblivious to the time you were losing while listening.
It seems to me that rather than decrying the concert hall as a listening paradigm, perhaps what we need to do is somehow come up with something that is some sort of contrapositive of music, a phenomenon which would somehow give you time back. Nicholson Baker’s 1994 novel The Fermata, whose title curiously references music, actually describes such an incomprehensible phenomenon. It tells the story of a man who has the remarkable ability to make time stand still all around him for as long as he wants while he does otherwise time-consuming activities without any time actually passing. But whereas Baker’s protagonist uses his remarkable time suspending ability to engage in elaborate bouts of voyeurism, think of all the other things you could do if you were somehow given an unaccounted-for year, week, or even an hour. For starters, think of all the additional music you could create or listen to!