by Nicholas Cook
Oxford University Press

The argument of the book is pretty much that when we listen to something for pleasure, we listen in a way that doesn’t have a lot to do with the sort of approach you see in analysis. Analysis is valid and valuable but it doesn’t describe the listening experience, it describes aspects of the music that then affect the listening experience through another model entirely.

The weird mistake he keeps making is he assumes that people currently enjoy listening to classical music! He makes this same demonstration over and over, along the lines of “here’s this feature of Beethoven that analysis would tell us is crucial to understanding the music as it was meant to be understood – and here’s this study that shows that the average listener isn’t sensitive to features like that…but people still like Beethoven, so therefore, the feature can’t actually be that crucial to enjoying the music!” It’s like it doesn’t even occur to him that people today just barely tolerate Beethoven. I mean, a lot of people might like the way it sounds, but when you just talk about the people who really want to sit and listen to it and not just have it in the background, and the number of those people who really want to hear a whole piece and not just a little snippet, you’re not talking about that large an audience. And a big chunk of that audience is going to be people who ARE sensitive to whatever that feature was. And another big chunk of that audience is going to be people who, you know, would go to a fashion show of the emperor’s new clothes, people who aren’t in touch with their aesthetic opinions because they’re too conscientious about liking art.¹ So I feel like there’s a major problem with these demonstrations that these things don’t matter to the average listener. I think that the dwindling interest in music based on these things is a good demonstration that they do matter.

In fact, I think the author does an excellent job at pointing out all the pieces of the problem, but he can’t see that it adds up to a problem! This is the passage that frustrated me the most, about Beethoven’s First Symphony, which starts with a then-very-bold, now-very-mild V7-of-IV chord:

Nobody today will find its opening surprising, as contemporary audiences did, in consequence of simple enculturation. The frequent use of dissonant and tonally oblique openings in music since Beethoven’s time means that nowadays one can only find the passage surprising through an exercise of intellect—by preparing oneself to be surprised, in other words. In order to achieve this, one would have to make a study of the stylistic norms prevalent in Beethoven’s day, so as to be able to respond to the First Symphony in the light of them. And this means that the music’s suprisingness is again no longer a musical fact, but a musicological one. Theorists like Meyer, who believe that the listener’s expectations and the composer’s deviations from them play a foundational role in the aesthetic effect of music, argue that musical style changes through history because what was formerly surprising becomes normal, so that new methods for creating surprise (for instance, the use of ever more extreme dissonances) have to be found; as Dowling and Harwood put it, ‘Art must change in order to maintain its power to move us.’ And yet Beethoven’s First Symphony still has the power to move us, even if we know nothing about the stylistic norms of 1800. It follows that, if what was surprising to Beethoven’s audiences is no longer surprising to us, then such effects of surprise cannot have a very important role to play in the enjoyment of music.

It would follow if he showed that people still enjoyed the music! What he’s in fact demonstrated is that it’s very unlikely that people do still enjoy the music as much as they did in its time unless things like surprise don’t have an important role in the enjoyment of music. And doesn’t that seem fairly unlikely? I mean, in 1800 you had an audience who thought, “whoa!” and today you have an audience who thinks…well, I have to assume that most of them are pretty much just thinking, “this certainly seems to be some classical music.” Something is lacking, no? The paragraph above makes a pretty good case (inadvertantly) that what’s lacking is stylistic knowledge that everyone in 1800 would have received naturally through “simple enculturation,” but that today you can only learn through study and can only apply through intentional mental preparation.

A big weakness in my argument is of course that I’m presuming to know that a lot of people who claim to like classical music actually only like it in a really superficial way, regardless of what they might say. So I have to grant that maybe I’m wrong about this. But look around! I’ve been to several absolutely awful classical performances, all by big-name performers, and at the end of each one there was a roaring standing ovation. You’re going to have to take my word for just how bad these concerts were. It’s inconceivable to me that these cheering audiences were listening for anything more than just that veneer of “some classical music.” That’s got to be what they were shouting “Bra-vo!” and “En-core!” about. The pretentious second-syllable emphasis really makes it clear; it’s all a show. Look at the attempts to cross-market classical music – like those girls in Britney outfits playing electric violins, for god’s sake – most of them are really just attempts to cross-market classical instruments. You know, “Orchestral No Doubt” or whatever, these things only exist because there’s an audience out there that gets some kind of kick out of the fact that a classical orchestra is playing something. No Doubt works just as well as Mozart – better, in fact, because they actually like the material! It’s like when you suddenly realize the Muzak in CVS is actually an easy-easy-listening arrangement of some song you know – the Muzak people know that the content is just a bonus; the real game is the surface effect.

And sure, you can say, “okay, then that’s what everyday listening is, it’s superficial” but that’s not how people listen to pop music; it’s not how people listen to music that they get and care about. What I’m saying is that the average person who hears Beethoven’s First Symphony and is totally unaware of the surprise but still “loves it” is not listening the same way, and therefore not loving it the same way, as when that person goes home and puts on U2 or whatever. Is that presumptuous of me? It may be, but I’m telling you it’s true, and the reason classical audiences are disappearing is because of that difference. Sure, there are lots of people out there who think classical music is “so beautiful!” – enough to fill all those empty seats I’m sure – but they’re not going to go to the classical concerts, for the same reason that they’re not going to go to a Muzak concert. Because ultimately the details don’t matter. That’s the argument that the book makes despite itself: here are the details, the details are what make the piece work, nobody hears the details, therefore the details don’t matter. Right, therefore they won’t go to concerts.

So what’s the solution? There’s two solutions.

First: education. The more people who have access to that musicological knowledge, who are at least able to understand that the first chord of Beethoven’s First Symphony used to be a shocker, then the more people who might choose to do the necessary role-playing and enjoy the piece. I feel like so many people I know, young people who know how to watch old movies and not just see the black-and-white, who know how to read old books and not just see the archaisms, are totally ripe to listen to old music and not just hear the “classical.” But they don’t have that option, because their education has failed them.

Second: contemporary composers who know what’s up. The whole problem being discussed here is how to get around the fact that all this music was written in musical cultures and contexts that don’t exist anymore, so there’s this burden on the audience to reassemble the mindset that would have been natural when the music was new. And it’s a common thing to point out, in musicology, that until the mid-19th century, people didn’t have any interest in old music. It was inaccessible and uninteresting to them, for this same reason, that it belonged to a dead culture and was written for a dead audience. But what the 19th-century had and we don’t, really, is new music written for a live audience. It’s this bizarre perversity of a lot of contemporary classical music that it’s almost all written only for the audience that has already taught itself to enjoy old music. Which means it’s totally forfeiting the actual contemporary audience. It’s stupid and it mostly has to do with this desparate entrenchment of the musical establishment that Henry Pleasants talks about in The Agony of Modern Music. But I think a lot of these composers just have blinders on – they try to address the present by writing a concerto for orchestra and SYNTHESIZED SOUND INCLUDING SAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY NEWS REPORTS or some bullshit like that. Which obviously has nothing to do with the musical present. If you told these composers to address the musical audience as it exists today, they’d probably say something like, “you seem to mean writing popular music; but that’s what popular musicians do, some of them very well. The world of ‘art’ music doesn’t have anything to add to that; what we do is offer the kinds of experience that could never exist within the limitations of popular music.” But that’s stupid stupid stupid! I’ll finish this later and tell you why it’s stupid. Stupid stupid.

¹ The concepts of being “bored” or “confused” have such overwhelmingly negative connotations. And it’s true that a stupid person will probably be bored and confused more often than a smart person. But in the presence of something boring or confusing, there’s nothing shameful about acknowledging that you’re bored or confused. Or, really, the only shame is that your mind is the type of mind that finds that thing boring or confusing, and the only reason to pretend otherwise is to save face – it won’t help you be less bored or less confused! Being bored or confused isn’t like a bad choice, it’s not a mistake. People who pretend not to be bored or confused when they’re faced with something that bores or confuses them are just playing a game with their ego; it has nothing to do with their interest level. I swear this is what’s going on a lot at classical concerts. It is a mistake to think, when you’re listening to Beethoven, “this can’t possibly be boredom I’m feeling, because this is a non-boring thing, objectively, and so that would mean I’m stupid. Therefore what I’m feeling right now must actually be some kind of aesthetic rapture!” I think a lot of these people let their minds wander and figure that must be the right track, and afterwards say they loved it. On the other hand, I hate people who trumpet, proudly, that they’re bored or confused, as though that’s damning of the thing that bored or confused them. It seems like the best possible response is to acknowledge to yourself that you do find something boring or confusing, and then seek out information that might help you not be bored or confused. If you find that there is no such information, and you really searched conscientiously, I think then you can feel confident that the thing really is boring or confusing, and I think then you have a right to say so. But again, to reiterate, to all my non-classical friends: Beethoven is not objectively boring just because you are bored by it. You just aren’t interested in doing that information hunt…and I can’t say that I blame you for that. But just don’t go acting like you figured out what’s wrong with classical music, i.e. that it sucks.