Tag: Music

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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EK: So what does art do? Why do we like it?

BE: One of the things that happen when you are looking at art or listening to art — something connects to you, and you think, “That’s what I really like. That’s what really moves me.” … I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about fine art, and it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is that it doesn’t translate into words. It doesn’t turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind. […]

EK: I always think about that as being on an album called “Music for Airports” because that is both very discordant and, as I thought about it more, exactly correct. That is, to me, one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard. And in a way, it gets to something true about airports, which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly, where they’re forced into — I mean, I feel this when I get on planes — a confrontation with their own mortality. There’s never a time when I’m in a plane that is having turbulence during takeoff when I don’t think — in a way I usually do not think in my day — “I could die.” There are all these people, they’re going to places that are, in many cases, incredibly important to them, and the airport is this extraordinary combination of a place that is so banal — lines, and you’re waiting in line for food that is mediocre, at best, and you’re late, and your plane is late, and you’re annoyed. And then it’s also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves — something that, for most of human history, was completely unimaginable. “2/1” on “Music for Airports,” to me, is such a perfect song because it’s more true about the airport than my experience of the airport is.

BE: [Laughs.] That’s a nice way of putting it. I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience, if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that I mean I used to be very frightened of flying, and of course, I had to do it at that time in my career.

But I thought: What if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention? If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better?

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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At the Marlboro Music School and Festival this summer, my fellow musicians and I spent an evening listening to historical recordings, an annual tradition. We ended with the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet (Op. 127), performed by the Busch Quartet, refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

This music is as profound as can be. From the first notes, I was in tears. Time was suspended, and nothing else existed. When it ended, I quietly left the room. Making polite conversation would have brought me back to earth; I wasn’t ready.

What I had experienced was complete immersion into music.

Most of life’s great moments are like this. We give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity. Past disappointments and future worries evanesce, allowing us to take in the present in its totality.

But in today’s frenetic world, such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is. […]

All sorts of people more qualified than I — sociologists, political scientists and media critics — have addressed the pernicious effects of social media and algorithmic marketing on our society and psyches. But I can testify that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus.

You may prefer literature or painting as art forms, but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not “about” anything. It stirs the emotions despite — or maybe because of — its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way. A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music. […]

As I listened to this astonishing music in the Marlboro dining hall, I never opened my eyes. This was an instinct. I sensed an opportunity to be connected to something profound and beautiful and in no way ordinary, and I did not want to let my other senses intrude on the experience. In our splintered, combustible world, this immersion is the path of most resistance, and a gift beyond words.

— Jonathan Bliss, from “Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven” (NY Times, Sept 28, 2025)

Mr. Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival

Portrait: OC87 Recovery Diaries. Photographer: Benjamin Ealovega

Two billion heartbeats and…

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Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing.
He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss. […]

In 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” […]

He opened his Beacon Theater concert with a full performance of that album wearing a blazer, without his usual ball cap. The suite’s sections are loosely held together by delicate guitar picking patterns, recurring vocal lines and occasional refrains. But they also explore enigmatic tangents and dissolve into abstract sounds. In the best way, “Seven Psalms” sounds like someone thinking aloud, melodically and philosophically. […]

Between songs, Simon spoke about musical constructions. He teased instantly recognizable “guitar figures” from Simon & Garfunkel songs before playing a weary, countryish version of his touring-musician’s lament, “Homeward Bound.” He explained “Rewrite” — sung by a burned-out character wishing he could rewrite his life story — as growing out of a beat and a quick-fingered guitar lick.

Simon’s songs have had grown-up concerns for decades. He sang about parenthood in “Graceland” and “St. Judy’s Comet.” He sang about inevitable disillusionment in “Slip Slidin’ Away.” He sang about reluctant breakups, wistfully, in “Train in the Distance” and drolly in “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.” And after explaining how he saw a song title in a photo caption, he sang about romance, art, consumerism and the power of music in “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” in the pointillistic arrangement from his 2018 album “In the Blue Light.”

His reedy voice is weaker and scratchier than it once was, but he was still game, reaching for high notes in “Slip Slidin’ Away” and “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” The restrained volume and the age of the audience made the room reluctant to sing along until near the end of the set. But when “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” arrived, and when Simon suggested “Sing!” during “The Boxer,” loud singalongs sprang up. For all his intricacies, he always knew how to write a hook.

— Jon Pareles, excerpts from “Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater: Quiet, Intricate, Masterly (NY Times, Jun 17 2025)

Photo: jambands.com

Sunday Morning

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Transcription for a letter by Helen Keller to the New York Symphony Orchestra
THE AURICLE
Published monthly by the Jersey City League for Hard of Hearing, Inc.
Vol. II March 1924 No. 6

In a recent number of the “Symphony Society Bulletin” appeared a remarkable letter written by Miss Keller, who is handicapped by deafness and blindness, and it was so full of inspiration, and suggestion, that our Editor obtained permission of Miss Keller to use the letter in our paper. We feel sure that you will all appreciate it, and join in thanking Miss Keller for this privilege and pleasure, and also for her cordial greetings and good wishes conveyed to us in a letter from her secretary.

New York Symphony Orchestra,
New York City.
Dear Friends:

I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” I do not mean to say that I “heard” the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy. Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and interwingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deeptoned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, I recognized them instantly as voices. I felt the chorus grow more exultant, more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flamelike, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorous [sic.] throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth-an ocean of heavenly vibration–and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes.

Of course this was not “hearing,” but I do know that the tones and harmonies conveyed to me moods of great beauty and majesty. I also sensed, or thought I did, the tender sounds of nature that sing into my hand-swaying reeds and winds and the murmur of streams. I have never been so enraptured before by a multitude of tone-vibrations.

As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marvelled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others—and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.

— Hellen Keller, The Auricle, Vol. II, No. 6, March 1924. American Foundation for the Blind, Helen Keller Archives.

Notes:

Collective effervescence

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From the outside, it’s easy to roll our eyes at devotees of everything from Taylor Swift to “Star Trek.” We deem them nerdy or frivolous, judge their costumes, the time they waste on Reddit, the money they spend on concert tickets.

What if they’ve figured out something the rest of us haven’t?

After all, so many of us lack community. Data from Cigna finds 58% of Americans are lonely. Religion is fading. Work doesn’t love us back. Maybe letting ourselves be obsessed with that highly specific and possibly weird thing we love is the answer…

“If it brings you joy, why not do more of it?” the 33-year-old architect asked, clad in an “Aladdin”-print dress. A photo of her and her husband wearing mouse ears hung on the wall behind her on our Zoom call.

More than six in 10 Americans said hobbies or recreational activities were extremely or very important to them, according to a 2023 poll from Gallup. That’s up from 48% in 2001 and 2002. Meanwhile, the share of people who said the same about religion dropped 7 percentage points, to 58%.

Picture a crowd swaying in unison to a beloved song. Everyone assembled feels the same emotion simultaneously, says Paul Booth, a professor of media and pop culture at DePaul University. The euphoria catches and builds. The experience, known as “collective effervescence,” can feel transcendent, he says, almost telepathic. “I think it has to do with wanting something in our lives that we can lose ourselves in,” he says. At a time of increasing polarization and cynicism—not to mention that coming election—it’s an especially wondrous connection, he adds…

“That’s the heart of a fandom,” says Tara Block, who fell in love with the “Harry Potter” books after graduating college. “You care a lot.”

— Rachel Feintzeig, from “What Superfans Know That the Rest of Us Should Learn.” (wsj.com, August 19, 2024)

Photo: Anna-m. w., London, England. People enjoying concert.