She Sees Her Own Reflection

There are many kinds of hearing aids, but perhaps more remarkable is the device that keeps its operator from listening: the bullhorn. Even rifles have a vital place in the education of young citizens, but to use a bullhorn presumes that the operator has nothing to learn that is relevant to the matter at hand. At the football stadium, one cheers for alma mater because she is our collegiate mother, not because our players are more skilled or in better condition. At graduation, students, having hopefully learned what they came for, can safely (OSHA permitting) be marshalled by the bullhorn. Any other time that a bullhorn appears on campus, however, one knows that something is wrong, and that learning will not resume until the bullhorns are silenced.

In our polarized political environment, there are all too many bullhorns, on campus and off. Progressives seem singularly averse to listening to what their opponents and rivals have to say: witness the proud mass desertion of Elon Musk’s less censored x.com for the curated “safe space” of Bluesky. But even those on the right have learned to recognize opposition voices and tune them out. Where once it took unusual fortitude for a conservative to ignore what the New York Times or 60 Minutes had to say, now they attend to those once authoritative outlets only to satirize their bias and mendacity.

We could all use an education in listening, and our young people, our future leaders, most of all. To quote President Richard Rochon of Cal State Fullerton, “I want to find ways in which we can create spaces where folks can disagree.” But to disagree, one first has to listen. For me to disagree, I must first have understood what somebody else has said, and having understood it, then take issue with it. We need to learn from the foundations how to listen to each other and then make our own contributions based on what we have understood. One might take up the theme of the previous contribution but alter it, perhaps radically. “We need common sense gun control,” says Mr. A. “Indeed,” says Ms. B, “we need to restore rifle practice to the physical education requirements of our schools and colleges.”

In responding relevantly, one might instead “join the issue,” thus continuing the theme of previous contributions, but inverting it by negation. “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians,” says the first speaker. “No,” says the second speaker, “Israel is preventing the Palestinians from carrying out their intended genocidal destruction of all Jews and their allies ‘from the River to the Sea.’”

In any case, both the speakers and the audience, if they are to relate in any kind of conversation, either have to recognize that the issue or theme remains the same even though the treatment of that differs from one speaker to the next, or (a more challenging alternative), change the theme in a persuasive way, such that those who have gathered to play out their agreements and disagreements can agree to the continuity with and superiority of the new theme to the old.

We can learn how to listen through music education rightly understood. As the political philosopher and music impresario Aryeh Tepper pointed out to me years ago, music education is education in listening to music and in making music by improving on what one has heard. One must be educated to recognize the form of a piece of music: What is the whole? What are the parts? What are the theme or themes that run through—and give form to—that whole and its parts? One must be educated to understand how each part of the whole, that is, the music as improvised—or, as composed and performed—is structured by the transformations, elaborations, and extensions of its themes.

Music appreciation, for the most musically educated, means appreciating how a piece of music can be put to work in making one’s own music. With an adequate music education, one knows not only how to play the piece, but how to vary it and how to improve on it. From understanding the themes of what one has heard and how those themes are put to work in its structure, one learns how to make music on old and new themes and work them oneself into a developed structure.

The last shining moment displaying the ability to create by listening is, to my very limited musical knowledge, the 1990 DNA remix of Suzanne Vega’s 1981 song Tom’s Diner. I have argued for years with anyone who will listen that no performance released since 1990 represents significant musical or technical innovation when compared with this 1990 remix, now 35 years old. Contrast the pace of innovation in any other 35-year period of western music since the birth of “Old Bach” in 1685.

Themes in contemporary music are radically simplified, and simple modifications of simple themes cannot carry a complex structure. Our music is simple because our most successful composers do not know how to listen to and elaborate on a theme; they often, like Sir Paul McCartney, have no formal musical education whatsoever. Our successful music, that is to say, our critically and popularly acclaimed music, is either short or painfully repetitive, as anybody who tries to listen to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s oeuvre will quickly realize.

But consider a more elaborate and even lengthier composition, the musical score of the 2001-2003 blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Howard Shore’s work won two Academy Awards for Best Original Score for both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, but its music consists largely of themes associated with particular groups of characters or particular subplots. The audience uses the musical themes to recognize the subplot threads in the complex tapestry of the films. To make the themes readily recognizable, they are generally repeated note for note with minimal variation. This is presumably because any greater variation on each theme would make the theme unrecognizable to the audience, which Shore and his director Peter Jackson correctly presumed to be musically uneducated. Just imagine what Wagner, Verdi, or Rimsky-Korsakov would have done with the same commission instead!

Seinfeld fans will recall that the actual Tom’s Restaurant at Broadway and 112th Street was the usual meeting place of the four main characters. That show’s running idea, according to its co-creator Larry David, was “no hugging, no learning.” Learning is impossible without listening, and we cannot learn the true parameters of our commonalities and differences until we learn to listen to each other once again. Perhaps we can learn to hear the words if we first learn to attend to the notes.