For one of their last assignments, I asked my students to write about Milton Babbitt�s 1958 essay, �Who Cares if You Listen.�* This essay is known by music students everywhere who read it and wrestle with the concept of academic music. The essay is a response to public complaint that new music (by which he means atonal avant-garde music written after the Second World War with an aesthetic that mandates originality in as many aspects as possible) is too difficult to listen to, too ugly and therefore not good or possibly not music at all. Babbitt�s pose is that music can�t evolve without freedom accorded other arts and especially sciences; since audiences aren�t educated enough to appreciate it, then let it stand for specialists only.

The essay is inevitably presented without context (it�s more fun that way). I find it impossible to imagine that Babbitt wasn�t being tongue-in-cheek, but rather that he sought to point out the problems that would arise from the erosion of audience. It is, after all, extremely unclear whether such a musical evolution is an achievement or a failure. But when presented as straight polemic, the essay inevitably gets the most passive students worked up and gets everyone thinking about a big question � not �who cares if you listen,� but �why do you listen?� The idea of music without an audience seems to be missing the point. Just what is music supposed to do?

As I�m reviewing my students� essays it occurs to me that it might have been interesting to ask them about what they would be most likely to listen to for fun and what they liked about it. If I were to answer that question, I probably would have answered with Sleater-Kinney, although I�m not sure this is the absolute truth. But there are many more things that affect the answer of such a question than meets the eye. To use the example of me and Sleater-Kinney, first, I like the sound � the gravelly voices, the rough-edged guitar riffs, the occasionally punk-edged shrieking alternating manically with sweet balladic passages. I like the lyrics too. Listening to Sleater-Kinney makes me feel like I�ve been drinking and dancing all night, but without the hangover. But really, it�s music that I feel reflects me in some way. That last one both explains why I listen to it and why I�m likely to talk about it to a classful of college students. It�s a band of women, some of them moms, all of them with an urge to say something. It�s an indy band (albeit a sort of mainstream indy band) with a particular kind of reputation � I�d be much less likely to acknowledge an abiding passion for Britney Spears or Englebert Humperdinck (mere examples, I assure you! You see, I feel the need for distance already. But I don�t listen to either of them, I swear!). The same issues afflict our listening of classical music as well, of course. Perhaps we want to appear smarter or richer or more educated. Perhaps we want to BE smarter or richer or more educated. (Well, duh!)

The question of so-called �new music� then becomes for me not whether understanding it and appreciating it is the problem (or the point) as much as what new music represents. Do we not like to listen to new music? Or do we not want to be new music listeners? Is there such a thing as too elite?

And yet while our musical choices seem to be wrapped up tightly with our sense of identities (both as they are and as we wish they would be), it also seems wrong to say that identity is the only reason we respond to a particular piece of music in a particular way. Which brings us back to the burning question � What is music for? What is music that doesn�t make money for? What is music that no one plays for? What is music that no one listens to for? Is it enough for a composer to hear and like what she�s written? Does the work need to communicate something, no matter how ineffable, to someone? What if the thing it�s supposed to communicate is that you shouldn�t waste your time listening to music?

Let me pose these subsidiary questions another way. If music doesn�t make money, is it still music? I think most of us would agree of course. Why? Because it can still be listened to and enjoyed and analyzed regardless of its commercial value. If no one plays music, is it still music? That one�s a little tougher. Well, of course there can be scores or even a computer rendition without a human performance. Trained musicians can hear scores in their heads. But really, that�s just another kind of listening. So I think the performer may indeed be unnecessary for the definition of music, even though the experience is far richer for the performer�s inclusion. If no one listens to music is it still music? This happens all the time.

If this were a student essay, I�d be scribbling all over the margins about now, �Needs examples.� And this, too, is a problem. Because of course, one woman�s music is another�s noise. I happen to like a lot of new music for a lot of different reasons, depending on what�s happening in the piece. I love the manic order of the Second Viennese school. I love the wild sounds George Crumb gets out of perfectly ordinary violins. Steve Reich�s Different Trains, in which he writes a string quartet based on recorded speech patterns about trains, changed the way I hear the world. I think of this piece every time I walk past the array of platform entrances at Northwestern Station in downtown Chicago and hear the voices announcing the track numbers piling onto each other in the echoing gloom. And although I may find myself humming one of the themes from a Beethoven symphony, I can guarantee you that I�ve internalized it to a much lesser degree, no matter how superior his work may be, no matter how refined and carefully articulated, how passionate.

It seems to me that the ONLY thing music is for is for listening. It shouldn�t matter, then, how much one understands or whether one actually likes it. If you listen to it as if it were music, then it is music. John Cage�s 4�33� is music in a concert hall or as part of an MP3 download (available at the above link!), but a moment of silence to commemorate a death is not. Theoretically, the sounds could be identical (could we postulate a 4�33� moment of silence). But one is called music (at least by some) and the other not. So is the rhythmic accumulation of the track announcements that feel so melodic to me music? Because to me it is musical? Perhaps. Does it make me the composer? I�m not sure. I am feeling now a need to reread Jacques Attali�s brilliant book Noise: A Political Economy of Music. Maybe he can set me straight.

*An assignment, incidentally, that generated some fabulous essay titles, including "I Care if I Listen," "Who Cares if You Enjoy it?", "Why We Should Listen, Regardless of Who Cares," and, my personal favorite, "No One Cares, Why Should I?"

[Second entry today. Click back for an entry that is nasty, brutish and (most importantly) short.]

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