10 Reasons Why to Use an iPod (and Earphones)

Not the iPod as it is used, but the iPod as it can be used. The iPod (with earphones)...

1. Destroys the concept of background music. Making music sound good is dangerous. Once our ears hear something pleasant, we can start to think that we understand the music. Music is meant to be pleasant, and the best music, the most pleasant—but when pleasure is extracted from the High music the same way pleasure is extracted from popular music, two things happen. (1) Popular music will always win (as it should, if that is the competition), and (2) High music becomes disappointing.

The iPod and similar technologies change all that. With the iPod's earphones pushed firmly in your ears, the music demands your attention. As C. S. Lewis says about art, "We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way." Not that I would suggest that a picture is better appreciated by looking at it with your nose touching the canvas. The iPod with earphones is preferable to CD players and computer speakers because it is far closer to the experience of live performance.

2. Is less individualistic and more corporate than music on a CD player. The iPod makes you aware of the performer. Your left speaker plays certain sounds into your left ear, and your right speaker plays certain sounds into your right ear. With this, you get a sense of distance between the players. This is fantastic. It's a constant, conscious or subconscious reminder that music is a communal thing.

3. Replaces music as a science. That teenager, doing the closest thing to lying down that you can in a chair, eyes on vacation and slobber collecting on his lip. Yeah, him. He has earphones in and he understands about popular music what Classical musicians don't understand about their music. We think he's rude when it takes yelling at him to pull him out of his musical seance. He probably is. But what if, instead of our caricatured teenager, we have someone whose profession in life is the study of J. S. Bach. Suddenly, the fact that it takes yelling to get him out of his iPod infatuation is a good sign. Like the college student engrossed in his calculus. Or biology. Or history. Or Latin.

Or music.

4. Teaches you about poetry. I was listening to a 12th century Christmas song on my iPod when I realized the guy was singing in Latin and I recognized the words. The iPod managed to remind me that it was just as sensible to say that I was hearing poetry as to say that I was listening to music. That sound of the saliva from the singers' dentals and labials can be heard much more deliciously when they're spat right onto your eardrums. Again, it's more like live performance.

5. Teaches you about ambience. Just like HD TVs can show you the pores on your favorite news anchor's face, the iPod lets you hear all the gory details of the music without everyone yelling at you to turn down the volume. Why is that an advantage? Yes, you guessed it. It's more like live performance. The iPod teaches you that music isn't on paper.

6. Teaches you about liturgy. Liturgy assaults the senses. It comes from all sides. That's what makes a football game so fun. When you listen to a Bach oratorio on an iPod, it's like a football game. Like I said in #2, you feel distances. You hear the details. You sense the contour. Texture is a thing only the best Bose speakers can emulate for a CD player. For an iPod with earphones, it's the name of the game. Antiphony, cyclicality, and juxtaposition are all heightened with your earphones.

7. Teaches you about polyphony. This was, to me, the most shocking and delightful thing about my iPod. At last I could hear mimesis. Out of my left ear came the soprano doing a motif, and then from my right ear a bass doing the same motif an octave lower. The iPod cheerfully murders the idea that counterpoint is beautiful only on paper. Ahh, I thought. It's almost like I'm there. Now, tell me you can hear the counterpoint on your CD player like that.

8. Teaches you about conversation. Mortimer Adler said Western civilization was engaged in a Great Conversation. Well, he was right, about music, anyway. The iPod imposes canonicity. You can move your thumb a centimeter and flip over centuries. Think of how that can change perception of music. It's the difference between having a Bible made up of separate scrolls for each book and having a Bible in one leather-bound volume. What's that do you to your understanding of theology? A lot.

9. Teaches you criticism. On my iPod, I have six (6) different recordings of Ravel's La Valse. I can put them all on a playlist and listen to them one after the other. Why would I want to? Well, they all just do that climax wrong. Simon Rattle goes slow enough that you lose the waltz. Pierre Boulez just drags. Charles Munich goes too fast. Bernstein is almost right—the trumpet crescendo is brilliant—but, there's just something. Hm.

10. Teaches you humility. My iPod Nano is smaller than a baby's foot and can hold 8 GBs of music. Yahoo answers says that's 2000 songs, which means that it can probably hold about 800 of mine. The "Cover Flow" feature is enough to remind me that there are galaxies of music I haven't visited, and I can flip through them with my thumb. It's a humbling thought. And fun.

(11. There's this cool game on my iPod called Vortex...just kidding. This is all thanks to my cousin Madeleine, who decided I was just awesome enough of a relative to deserve an iPod for Christmas. You can blame my corrupted self on her.)

Suzuki and Talent

If the Suzuki method has proven that a toddler can acquire excellence in musical performance the way he learns a language, why can't we extend the logic to musical composition? A daughter seeing her father having fun working calculus problems on a page will, without a doubt, turn out to be great at math. So, maybe it's that, and not his genes, that allowed Mozart to be writing those symphonies at 3. Or whatever. (In the words of Michael Flanders, "I very much wanted to play the music of Mozart, in particular his wonderful horn concerto in E flat, which he wrote at about the age of 18 months. Marvelous man.")

Suzuki's brilliance lay in one core idea—mimesis. Children can pick up a language when they're one year and two years old, becoming fluent in a tongue high school students in a different country spend years and undesirable toil to accomplish the same thing. What allows toddlers to do that?

Suzuki said it was seeing their parents do it. When a child sees his mother and father using language, he wants in on it. He can see the pleasure and the utility that results from language, so he imitates, with no textbook knowledge of grammar, of phonetics, idioms, or anything. Only his ear. Suzuki, therefore, insisted that parents take lessons with their children. You can see the result—the 4-year-old who would never practice before would be jumping up and down, throwing a tantrum because his mother got to practice and he didn't.

So, can we try the same thing with composition?

Bach and Newton

"In August 1750, just days after Bach's death, Agricola wrote:

He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach's] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structure] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in the profound science so they can understand him will find the greatest gratification and real benefit in reading his work."

("Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'". Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Christoph Wolff.)

Several interesting things here - the fact that Wolff feels that "harmonies" and "musical structure" are somewhat synonymous in the 18th century German tongue (drawing any tempting conclusions would be unsubstantiated conjecture on my part) and also the fact that, were it a reference to what we'd actually call Bach's harmonies, we wouldn't think of them as complex at all. We've been acclimatized in that respect. If it's a broader "musical structure" that's so complex (such as setting a poetic German text to 9 part choral harmony and two separate orchestras), I see what they mean. Finazzi's still wrong, though. Bach's congregations didn't seem to mind his "difficult harmony" so much, after all.

So, then, what culture does the Church belong to?

"Culture is not a shadowy something existing in secret 'behind' its 'manifestations' in language, rites, and disciplines. Culture is a people organized and united by its language, rites, rules, and mechanisms of enforcement.

So also is the covenant.

So also is the Church."

(Against Christianity, Peter Leithart, pg. 51.)

The Musically Gifted, Part II: How About Classical Education

The whole mission of Magister Perotinus could be summed up in those two words—classical education. What brings together the hodgepodge of posts on this blog is the idea that music is an essential ingredient of paideia and must be treated as such.

As I've mentioned before, this is the reverse of our usual categories. We think of music as an art derived and governed by certain scientific principles. It's all about overtones and neurology, but with the "passion" and "human ingenuity" that only our artistic sides can add to the music. The classical model is the reverse of this. Music is a part of the quadrivium, or four-way intersection, in Latin, of, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and music. These are the four liberal sciences. The three liberal arts are grammar, logic, and rhetoric, forming the trivium (yep, three-way intersection). The arts (or, perhaps we could, as I mentioned earlier, think of them as "skills" as well as "arts") are like a template. Grammar isn't necessarily a study in itself (unless you're talking about syntax and construction, which is a different thing). You study the grammar of several different subjects, like geometry—theorems, common notions, axioms, that sort of thing—or like what we might call general science—Na is sodium, the Fall of Constantinople was in 1453, and combustion has something to do with oxygen.

What's the equivalent for music? Studying the grammar of music would be gaining a basic knowledge of musical nomenclature. Reading music, learning your dominants and submedians, plagals and deceptives, and fun stuff like that. The logic would begin to delve into the reasons behind these things, like harmonic and structural analysis, polyphony in general, counterpoint analysis, substitutions, etc. And the rhetoric is the application and outgrowth of that—now write me a fugue.

What we're seeing is a radically different picture than what we're used to. Many parents might assume that giving their kids a classical education in music necessitated them throwing their kids into piano lessons or clarinet lessons where they'd learn how to play piano or clarinet. Somewhere in there, they'd learn some "ear training" and "music theory". Just so they know how to play. Obviously, we don't necessarily want our kids to become music majors.

But this isn't what the classical model is talking about when they speak of musical education. If you're musically educated, you're educated to write music, not just perform it. Or, to put it more bluntly—you think you're an educated person? Then, you should be writing music. Crank out a fugue!

They will probably say I set my sites too high. But this is the goal of Magister Perotinus. A restoration of composition as a part of education. Take an example like the New Saint Andrews College undergraduate degree. My suggestion is this—if they really take their higher education seriously, they should be aiming towards giving every graduate the ability to write a good Bach-style chorale. Why? Because this is a part of what they're trying to do. This is classical education.

And, as always is the proviso, this is also generational. My hope is not to see kids five years from now at some higher education college writing fugues as an undergraduate requirement. But I think my great, great grand-children should be doing that.

Why this is, I think, necessary both from a theological and aesthetic perspective, I'll have to take up some other time. This is long enough.