The Socrates Express

Music reaches us when nothing else can. A ray of light in the darkness. William Styron, in his memoir on depression, Darkness Visible, describes how he was contemplating suicide when he heard a soaring passage from Brahms. “The sound, which like all music—indeed, like all pleasure—I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through the rooms, the festivals, the love and work.”

Music is therapy. Listening to music speeds cognitive recovery after a stroke, several studies have found. Patients in minimally conscious, or even vegetative states, showed healthier brain activity when listening to a favorite song.

I recognize the benefits of music intellectually, but can’t seem to make the leap to a more intimate knowledge. I suffer from a kind of musical apathy. As a teenager, I never collected albums or compiled mixtapes. I attended concerts rarely, only when coerced by friends. To this day, entire genres of music remain foreign to me. I am not opposed to music. If played, I enjoy it, though not as much as I enjoy a good Scotch or a good bag. This lack of musical appreciation has always struck me as odd, given my love of sound and the spoken word.

There’s an old joke we like to tell at NPR.

“Why is radio better than television?”

“Because the pictures are better.”

There is something primal about oral storytelling. We humans have been listening to stories far longer than we’ve been reading them. Sound matters. The written word excels at conveying information, the spoken word at conveying meaning. The written word is inert. The spoken word is alive, and intimate. To hear someone speak is to know them. This explains the popularity of NPR, podcasts, and audio books. It also explains why my mother insists on phone calls, not emails, each Monday.

Working for NPR as a foreign correspondent, I learned to appreciate the rich and varied texture of sound. The singsong call of a Delhi street hawker, the cacophony of a Tokyo pachinko parlor. What intrigued me most, though, was the sound of the spoken word. The human voice is nature’s greatest lie detector, and I soon learned to gauge a speaker’s sincerity within seconds. Politicians are the least sincere not only because of their gutless vocabulary but also their tone of voice. Cautious and falsetto. Even a child can recognize the voice of someone selling something. Especially a child.

Why can’t I translate this intuitive feel for sound to the world of music? Perhaps I don’t know enough about music, or perhaps the limited knowledge I do possess is tripping me up, preventing me from hearing this universal language of the heart.

My friend John Lister is an aficionado of both classical music and German philosophy. Plus, he lives in Baghdad, where he works for a relief agency. For security reasons, John is confined to his hotel for days at a time. John has a lot of time on his hands. The perfect correspondent.

I fire up my laptop and ask John if his knowledge of music enhances his enjoyment or interferes with it. How can I learn to appreciate music? I hit send.

A few hours later, a lengthy reply lands in my inbox. I scan John’s email, which runs to several pages, and am silently grateful for both his erudition and the surplus time he has on his hands.

“So these are all tough questions,” writes John, then proceeds to tackle them as if they weren’t tough at all. Knowledge of music, he says, enhances your enjoyment of it. “It may give you specific insights into the music that you might not otherwise have and it might prevent you from becoming so captivated by the tonal beauty that you see music as only an aesthetic experience.”

Music doesn’t have a single home. It “hovers between two worlds.” (I can practically hear Schopenhauer murmuring his assent.) Different types of music, John continues, require different kinds of listening. Wagner is easy. “The music is sensuous to the point of being like a drug rush.” Beethoven and Mahler and Brahms are trickier. “You feel that you are trying to understand what another person is trying to communicate directly to you. Wagner talks to you about something. Beethoven, Mahler, and Brahms talk to you. That is the difference.”

There’s another, more practical, reason to know something about musical structure, John explains. It disciplines the ear. You know what to listen for, so the mind is less likely to wander.

Schopenhauer thought a lot about the wandering mind. We view the world in a calculating, mercenary way, he said. The Amsterdam stockbroker intent on closing a deal is oblivious to the world around him; the chess player does not see the elegant Chinese chess pieces; the general doesn’t see the beautiful landscape as he makes his battle plan.

We must have a different, less transactional, relationship with music. We must experience it from a disinterested perspective. Disinterested but not uninterested. There is a difference. To be uninterested in a piece of music is to be apathetic toward it. To be disinterested is to harbor no expectations, make no demands of the music, yet remain open to the possibility of aesthetic delight. A Buddhist would say we are not attached to the music but nor are we detached from it. A Christian mystic would say we maintain a “holy indifference” toward it. The idea is the same. True listening demands we postpone judgment. When we listen like this, hearing without judging, says Schopenhauer, we “feel positively happy.”