The Lost Art of Listening: Has classical music become irrelevant?
The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past.
.. If we properly engage with it, surely it offers an experience of empathy, and not just any empathy, but a transgenerational empathy, in which we try on human feelings from another era.
.. In his brilliant essay on the impact of television, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, the American novelist David Foster Wallace laments the modern-day scourge of irony: “Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalised irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny.” He fantasises about the emergence of “some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”.
.. Classical music is not always single-entendre (Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has a bruising subtext), but in an era dominated by irony there is something restorative about its sincerity.
.. but for some time the arts have not been an end in themselves; there has only been one end, and that is Growth.
.. there are good pragmatic reasons to invest in music education. Ironically, it might even contribute to Growth. Countless studies reveal that music education will improve our children’s executive function, social ability, literacy, numeracy, concentration, brain function, fine motor skills, creative thinking, working memory, study habits, and even their self-esteem.
.. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language.
.. The music that is closest to my heart is chamber music. It is music on a human scale, a single voice to a part: the solo piano repertoire, the lied, the piano trio, the string quartet. A true child of the Enlightenment, the string quartet was described by Goethe as “four reasonable people conversing”.