Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The argument that atonal modernism \u201cchased away\u201d the audience for classical music\/concert music\/art music (choose your favorite flawed terminology) is practically a clich\u00e9 at this point. But the bigger shift was technological. At the same time as the advent of atonality, our relationship with music was undergoing the greatest sea change in history: live performances were displaced by recorded, broadcast, or otherwise electrically and electronically mediated performances. And one can interpret McLuhan’s framework so that the primary feature of Romantic music\u2014its flair for creating the illusion of startlingly immediate emotions\u2014became the \u201ccontent\u201d of music once its dominant mode of consumption became electronically mediated. In other words, the phonograph, the radio, the recording studio made the emotional contagion of music the end, not the means. Considering McLuhan’s framework leads us to another counter-intuitive possibility: that, for a hundred years, the intended meaning of any piece of music has been lost in translation, its technological mediation filtering out everything but the emotional contagion.<\/p>\n
It’s an esoteric interpretation. But it would explain a lot. It would explain why one of music history’s most zealous projects, the post-World War II determination to dismantle the legacy of Romanticism, foundered so completely. It would explain why some of the most thrilling and fascinating music of the past one hundred years, music that still can generate an electric response in the concert hall, found no traction on record or radio. And, more to the point, it would go a long way toward explaining why two generations and counting of conscious efforts to \u201creconnect\u201d with audiences, of composers and performers producing music conceived in tonality and dedicated to the proposition that accessibility and clarity are fundamental to musical practice, have failed to forestall yet another political and historical moment in which our capacity for empathy has been ruthlessly and thoroughly crowded out by emotional contagion. But the notion also implies a dilemma: the music best able to engineer empathy might be that which is the hardest sell to a listener\u2014because it is the most at odds with the way we have come to listen to music.<\/p>\n
Like most dilemmas, it’s older than we think. The ancient Greeks were already worrying about it, forever theorizing how to channel music’s capacity for moral improvement, forever peppering those theories with observations that so much of the music that surrounded them eschewed morality for an easy emotional response. Aristotle, like so many after him, tried to square the circle with crude class distinctions, contrasting \u201cthe vulgar class composed of mechanics and laborers and other such persons\u201d with \u201cfreemen and educated people,\u201d resigned to the necessity of appealing to the former with \u201cactive and passionate\u201d harmonies\u2014since \u201cpeople of each sort receive pleasure from what is naturally suited to them\u201d\u2014but insisting that, for education, \u201cthe ethical class of melodies and of harmonies must be employed.\u201d (Not incidentally, this discussion<\/a> takes place in the eighth and final book of Aristotle’s Politics<\/em>.) But somehow I think that even Aristotle’s educated people were just as susceptible to emotional contagion as his mechanicals.<\/p>\nIt’s not a class trait, or a national trait, or an aesthetic trait; it’s a human one. Emotion is easy; empathy is hard. We prefer listening to<\/em> over listening with<\/em>, a preference reinforced, perhaps, by the inescapable electronic web we’ve woven around ourselves. We keep believing that the one can lead to the other. But is that, in actuality, anything more than a feeling?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In English, invariably, we listen “to” a piece of music. Never “with” a piece of music. That little rut of syntax conceals a speed bump on what seemingly should be a musical express lane: the generation of empathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":651,"featured_media":435340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,3,38],"tags":[109,110,111,112,113],"nmb_categories":[6],"how_to_category":[],"nmb_tags":[],"internal_taxonomy":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n
On Empathy - New Music USA<\/title>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n