Alex Ross on Music

The human species likes to use music as a means of taking comfort and finding the familiar: we relax to it, let it conjure bygone days, rely on it to identify like-minded people. Although there’s no great harm in that, the habit of employing music as a kind of glorified Facebook diminishes its creative force. When we go to a museum or pick up a novel, we don’t expect to catch up with old friends; we hope for fresh adventures. Music, by contrast, too often serves as a tool of narcissistic self-satisfaction. The fact that technology so neatly cocoons us in playlists of Our Favourite Songs abets the tendency. Yet the history of each person's taste invariably contains a few shocks of the new. I remember when Wagner repelled me, when Dylan was a meaningless croak. Those antipathies are now so foreign that I hardly recognize my former self.

In fact, music is never so powerful as when it breaks down the self’s defenses. John Cage once defined it as the art of listening to other people, and it’s an idea worth living by. From time to time, subject yourself to a sound that seems to lie outside your sympathy or understanding. Investigate a genre that you think you hate. Go to a concert where you recognize the names of none of the composers. Attend an evening of traditional melodies from a country you can’t easily find on a map. If you don’t get it, read something on the Internet, wait a day or a year, and listen again. From time to time, the alien will suddenly become second nature, and you will feel a shade more free.

Alex Ross is author of Listen To This (Fourth Estate, November 2010). He’ll be speaking at The School of Life on 29 November 2010 click here for more details.

Comments

[genevieve]

'When we go to a museum or pick up a novel, we don’t expect to catch up with old friends; we hope for fresh adventures. Music, by contrast, too often serves as a tool of narcissistic self-satisfaction.'
Alex, far be it from me to challenge you! as I love your work. But we do reread novels...indeed, we do! What, for example, is one to make of people who reread The Great Gatsby once a year? what of poetry?
Having said that, your point about music as Facebook is more pertinent now than it ever was. I hate driving in my car with music up loud now, as no one else is listening/dancing/emoting/singing along.