How to listen to contemporary classical music

How can you open the doors of your music perception? This was the question I raised in the second part of my series on contemporary classical music (here's the first part). In this follow up article I will try to answer it. Hopefully I will be able to show that it is not as difficult as most people think.

Listening to different kinds of music implies unlearning things even more than learning. So much so that children have no problem with music most adults categorize as weird—or not music at all (if you have ever heard a toddler hit the keys of a piano you know what I mean). Children learn to like different foods by being exposed to them several times. They are lucky not to have any previous definitions (and, sometimes, the bad luck of having terrible tutors); indeed they have to come up with those while growing up. That is the meaning of growing up. Picasso famously said that "all children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up."

So, while it is true that learning music formally gives you better tools and predisposition to know about this subject, it is also possible to learn by listening, so to speak. You just start somewhere and give it a chance. As with food, it involves trying different things, often more than once.

But for this exercise to be successful it is important to leave aside very strict definitions of what music is or should be. Everyone has their own—if only tacit—definition and my experience shows it goes along these lines:

Music is organized sound, composed of melody, rhythm and harmony.

If we were to picture this, it would look (and sound) like this:

Here we can see the melody represented (mainly) on the higher pentagram and the harmony on the lower. Really, the harmony is also implied by the melody, but it is easier to see it in the form of chords. The rhythm emerges from the different durations of each note.

This definition is good enough for a lot of music, from ancient Greece to European classical music up to the beginning of the twentieth century (quite unsurprisingly, since this is where the definition comes from). It also comprehends most contemporary popular music and music from other cultures—although here it starts to break. Certain contemporary popular genres also don't fit this box very well. I once heard someone say that electronic music is not music because it has no melody. That is why our task is to find a broader definition, one that can also accept "weirder" types of music.

What is music, really?

To do that I would like to step back and wander about the role of music in our lives. You might have noticed that our definition doesn't specify how the sounds should be organized in order to considered musical (apart from a vague mention of harmony, etc.). It is important to remember that music can play different roles, such as liturgic, festive, ceremonial, etc. As you have probably noticed we favor different genres in different situations. This has to do with the emotional charge of each occasion and how we want the music to resonate with it. This is a crucial element that separates music from other "organized sounds" (such as speech), so we might as well include it in our definition:

Music is sound organized in such a way as to provoke a range of psychological responses in a human audience, and is composed of melody, rhythm and harmony.

Now, what these psychological responses are and how they are achieved through music are way beyond this little essay. But I would like to mention a few notes about the pleasure of sounds. For example, many people like to walk in the forest, listening to the rustling sound of tree leaves. Others like to lie down on a beach or by a river, while listening to the water. Most parents are familiar with the practice of playing white noise to help their baby fall asleep. The perception of a roaring sound might evoke fear of a predator, or a nice voice might arouse our sexual interest.¹

Whatever the origins of these psychological effects on us are, composers take advantage of them. When they do so successfully we enjoy the music. Obviously, given such a platform, there is a lot of room for cultural variations; that is what the second part of this series was all about.

With the exception of the human voice, all of the sounds mentioned above are examples of what, in acoustics, we call non periodical waves, that is, sounds without a defined frequency. During the Middle Ages the faintest hint of them was so dreaded by the Church that all instruments were banned from its liturgy. Only the human voice was considered worthy of God.²

Gradually musical instruments were introduced in Western music, but always relegating non periodical sounds to the background. That is why percussion instruments did not play a meaningful role in classical music until the second decade of the twentieth century.³ That's centuries avoiding sounds that are perfectly fine from the perspective of human perception—not to mention other cultures.⁴

This was part of a larger historical trend to expand the timbre space and it is symptomatically reflected on the way the music is written. A typical sheet of Baroque or Classical music contains almost exclusively pitches and durations. The only direct mention of timbre is the intrument name indication (for piano, for orchestra, for orchestra, etc.). You will find intensity (piano, forte, sforzando, etc.) phrasing and some forms of mood indications (dolce, cantabile, etc.), all of which which influence the timbre indirectly. But that's all.

An eloquent demonstration of this characteristic is the fact that you can transcribe any piece by Bach from one instrument to pretty much any other instrument and still get the same piece.

Indeed, you can easily recognize Bach's orchestral language in his keyboard works and vice-versa.

The Western classical music took long to start incorporating non periodical sounds, but when if finally caught up, it seems to have tried to compensate for the lost time and wanted to elevate them to the status of stars, as in Varèse's Ionisation, one of the first composed exclusively for percussion instruments.

In other words it is now legal to say that waterfall or ocean sounds are also musical, and can be included in a piece and enjoyed as we would in loco. Let us, then, attempt a new definition:

Music is organized sound, intended to provoke a variety of psychological effects on a human audience by means of its quality alone, independent of semantic content, and which may include melody, rhythm, harmony, recorded or electronic sounds or any combination of these.

This satisfactory, albeit clumsy, definition is a lot more permissive and allows us to include the rest of the Western classical music and hopefully music from other cultures. My first example that would not be accepted as music in the previous definition, but is in the new one, is everything that falls under the umbrella of electroacoustic music. Because of its origins in the so-called musique concrète, it often contains sounds recorded from nature or public places. This is convenient because we can take advantage of a phenomenon similar to semantic saturation. If you want to achieve this you can chose a random word and repeat it until you lose touch with its meaning and are able to appreciate exclusively its sound features. Really, try it.

You can then do the same with familiar sounds and try to remove from them all reminiscence of meaning. In the water sounds example you can immerse yourself in them and get lost in its internal qualities, while trying to forget where they come from. This is why electroacoustic music is sometimes also called acousmatic. Presque Rien, by Luc Ferrari is a classic example. You can hear all kinds of recognizable sounds there, but try to keep your focus on the sound waves, so to speak, instead of what they mean, that is, what produced them in the first place.

The juice

Next, I would like to expand our definition one notch by making it yet a bit broader. For that I would like to go back to instrumental music.

The transposition parade we've seen above is only possible because traditional Western classical music lies on the relationship between pitches. But take any piece from Berio's Sequenzas and this task becomes virtually impossible,⁵ as the composer—often in close collaboration with the instrumentalist—"squeezes" the instrument in order to get those sounds that are the most idiomatic to the instrument. I call this instrument juice. This is not to say that you can't transcribe contemporary pieces, but often this is an exercise in re-creation.

So one way of getting started with contemporary music is to shift the focus away from what you see in a traditional music sheet, since this is a method that evolved to represent traditional melodies, rhythm and harmony. A good example of this is what became known as spectral music. In this type of composition, the focus shifts away from pitches, that is notes, towards what we can call sound masses. The sheet for this kind of music is usually as beautiful as it is cryptic.

I warned the reader that this music is considered difficult by most people. But I hope I was able to show that this is the case only if you have a restrictive and unshakable definition of music. If you let your inner child-artist freely float in this universe, I'm sure you will be able to enjoy it. If nothing else I hope I was able to raise your curiosity for contemporary classical music. Maybe in a few years time you will remember this and try again. Maybe to your surprise. So let us venture a final attempt:

Music is organized sound, intended to provoke a variety of psychological effects on a human audience by means of its quality alone, independent of semantic content, and which may include melody, rhythm, harmony, sound masses or any combination of these.

Finally I would like to mention another way of approaching the whole issue: to shift the focus from the object to the subject, like my favorite (and beautifully tautological) definition, by Italian composer Luciano Berio: "Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music." This allows you to tell people you are going to a concert when you go for a walk in the forest. It also restitutes all of the imaginable sounds back into our repertoire so we can appreciate them without prejudice. Do take this opportunity.

Footnotes

1. For a compelling account of the evolutionary basis of music perception I recommend the last chapter This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin. The whole book is worth the read, but the last chapter is the one dealing with evolution of music perception. ↩

2. To be precise, the human voice also contains a lot of non periodical sounds: the vast majority of the consonants; they carry a lot of verbal meaning, but the traditional theory of music survives absolutely well without any mention of them. Another important role of the non periodical sounds is in timbre, more precisely the part of the sound morphology known as the attack, which is not periodical in most instruments. ↩

3. African cultures, on the other hand, have a long tradition of consciously and systematically including "dirtier" sounds into their music. It is no wonder music from that continent is strongly associated with rhythms and percussive instruments. ↩

4. It is also worth mentioning that medieval popular music was full of instruments, even percussion, and probably one reason for the lack of instruments in the church was that they could keep liturgic and secular music separate. But most of the classical music spawns from the church, at least until the seventeenth century. ↩

5. Berio himself transcribed Sequenza IXa (for clarinet) for contralto saxophone. Notably these are sibling instruments—both high pitched woodwind—and still the composer thought it deserved a separate name, Sequenza IXb. ↩