“Listening to Classical Music”- a sampling

Leonard Norwitz —

Theme: What Is Music?

“This means something . . . this is important.” So puzzles Roy Neary, the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as he stares at a mound of mashed potatoes on his dinner plate that he’s accidentally sculpted. Stanley Kubrick’s ape seems to have the same thought as he toys with a large bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And it’s almost certainly how the average uninitiated person today feels about classical music: It seems to mean something to other people — important, perhaps, but also mysterious, baffling … and makes about as much sense as a heap of mashed potatoes. 

What is so special about classical music, and how is it like and unlike other musics? How can those of us who keep classical music at arm’s length shorten that distance? Why should we? As to that, who is this music meant for, and why? And if music is a connecting agent for our species, how and why is it used as a way to discriminate between sub-culture and classes? 

For that matter, why does music — all music — affect us so? 

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Variations: Musics

Just as art is understood as such by how it is viewed — in museums and galleries — classical and popular music is, in part, defined by where and how we listen to it. The lyrics and listening venues of country and hip-hop music especially tend to reinforce, explain and, in their way, perpetuate the life styles of its audiences, where each listener feels the song is speaking to him or her individually and then shared, witnessed automatically by a larger, oftentimes, unseen audience. Popular “songbook” music, from Bing Crosby to Billie Eilish, tends to remove the singer from the equation, insofar as the lyric is not about them. They sell the song, not their autobiography. Classical music, as if fearful of social contagion, goes to even greater lengths to remove itself, even in opera, from the lived experience of its audience. This is not to say that the ways classical music is listened to does not serve a similar function as popular music, it just doesn’t suffer generational fashion as does its counterpart.

Not only the music, but the entire classical music listening chain is more layered, more rarified, more formalized. Yet, more often than not, in the listening experience, with the peeling away and addressing of each layer, listeners open themselves to new experiences that challenge the imagination rather than to reinforce one’s understanding of the possible.

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Andante: Active Listening 

In his first Young People’s Concert from 1958, Leonard Bernstein asked the question: “What does music mean?” And he gave us an answer by example: “It’s the way it makes you feel when you hear it.” 

Exactly!  The meaning of music, its purpose if you will, is to stir feelings — physiological and emotional.  The intended response is usually deliberate, whether those feelings be calming, inspiring, excited, anxiety-producing, depressing, loving; the list goes on. Classical and popular music composers have the same objective, but go about achieving their ends differently. 

Classical music is simply more complex; the phrases are generally longer; the harmonies, more wide-ranging; the melodies and rhythms, less predictable.  The performer interprets and manifests the score to give it aural corporeality and dynamic shape.  The audience listens actively or passively, internalizing their response until the applause that follows, as with the falling of the curtain on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a release from imprisoned feeling.