Appreciating Music

[University of Michigan, 2008]

               “For people today, an automobile or an airplane is more valuable than a violin, the circuitry of the computer’s brain more important than a symphony.  We pay all too dearly for what we regard as comfortable and essential, while we heedlessly discard the intensity of life in favor of the tinsel of creature comforts—and what we have once truly lost, we will never be able to regain.  I could not agree more with Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s evaluation of the state of music in our lives today.  We place higher values on material “necessities”:  houses, boats, that new pair of shoes.  Baseball players are paid millions of dollars a year while the cellist in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra struggles to get by somewhere in the thousands.  America would rather watch a football game then attend a concert by the Chicago Symphony, with or without someone as prestigious as Josh Bell.  This “intensity of life” that Harnoncourt speaks of, this is what people are missing out on.  We are so concerned with who won the Knicks game or when the new model of our favorite car comes out that we forget to appreciate the real drive behind the utmost expression of our present circumstances:  music. 

            I find the paradox in the aesthetic view of contemporary music to be intellectually exciting yet extremely disturbing at the same time.  In the past, music has been the instrument of expression for the current circumstances of our world, culture, or society.  Music, therefore, could only be fully understood by the people of its era.  In other words, music has previously functioned as a fashion statement of the time; whatever situation or mood was occurring, the music was a reflection of that mood or situation and the styles, consonances, dissonances, and sounds were written in accordance to these times.  But today, all that is changed.  Music’s position as white noise in our society has eliminated the use of extreme dissonance or unsettlement in sound, because who wants to wake up in the morning to a horrific clash of intervals, and who wants to hear the opening chords of Jean-Fery Rebel’s Les elements while drifting off to sleep?   But according to the historic definition of music, that it should first and foremost be a reflection of the society from which it comes, dissonance and unsettlement is a necessity in today’s world.  We are surrounded by dissonance and unsettlement in real life, with war, poverty, abuse, disease, and crime.  If this unsettlement is not reflected in contemporary music, what is to say that in a few hundred years people will look back on the music produced in this time period and think that our era was one of harmony and accord?  We no longer treat music as a way to express our situations; rather we use music as a comfort to the situations that we find ourselves to be in.  Stressed and overworked, we turn to harmoniousness and tranquility for comfort, not dissension and discord.  We rely on the music of our ancestors, the beauty that lies within Mozart and Beethoven, because it is in this music that we find consolation and solace from the pressures of our every day lives.  Music has in fact lost the power to shake us, because when we listen to music, we aren’t truly listening.  It is simply a combination of noises we use to fill the silence, sound waves of relief to keep ourselves sane.

            Harnoncourt offers many solutions to the ever growing problem of music appreciation and comprehension in today’s world.  First and foremost, he says, we should turn to the classics:  Bach, Mozart, and Monteverdi.  Understand the music of these men, he says, and we will then understand what music truly is, that its function goes beyond simply being beautiful, and that it has the capacity to unnerve us.  Only then will we be able to turn back to the music of our time, the music analogous with our own society and our own problems, and use today’s music as a means for pushing forward and developing solutions.  Harnoncourt also emphasizes the importance of “living within our own culture.”  To do so, he offers two approaches:  using new methods of teaching music, that is, teaching music as a universal language, a means of expression, rather than simply a series of technical processes, and secondly, rethinking the status of music training. 

“We all need music; without it we cannot live.”  Harnoncourt’s bold final words go beyond the music of Baroque and Classical music.  What he means is that not only do we use music as a white noise in our every day lives to get us through our day, but we also need music as a historical indicator of the attitudes of our present epoch.  Without music, our lives would be filled with a disconcerting silence.  If music were to be eliminated in our lives, society would be extremely upset.  Yet here we are, completely engulfed with music in our lives, and failing to appreciate it, even acknowledge its presence, study it, or broaden our aesthetic views of it.  

It seems to me that music in our present world is a form of white noise.  Our everyday lives are filled with continuous music, from the moment we wake up to the sound of a radio alarm clock to those last moments of consciousness at the end of the day as we drift off to sleep to the sound of catchy musical tunes advertising the latest product of this material world’s technology.  We listen to music in the car, in the workplace, in the elevator, and even on the phone while put on hold.  Music is everywhere, but are we really listening?