Today, while waiting at the local library for AJ to get out of story hour, I went prowling through the music shelves to see what I could find. This is a very small town with a very small library, at least half of which is devoted to children�s books, so I had never bothered to look in this section before, thinking there couldn�t be anything of interest. It�s hard not to be a snob about libraries when you have ready access to one of the best university libraries in the world. Much to my surprise, I ended up bringing a couple of things home. The first was a book on American operetta that had a reference to something I�ve been working on but had not been able to locate. The second was Nick Hornby�s Songbook.

I�ve been meaning to pick up Songbook since I first read about it on McSweeney�s a couple of years ago. The book is a collection of brief essays on 31 pop songs, most of which seem to focus on Hornby�s personal associations with the songs. The book is accompanied by a CD that holds a mix of about a third of the songs.

I love the premise of this book when I first heard about it. As anyone who�s been reading this diary for very long is likely to know, I like to think and write about songs in this general way too (although I am certainly no Hornby). The reason I picked the book up today, however, was that I saw that one of the songs he writes about is by Nelly Furtado. I�ve been thinking about writing an entry about my secret love of Nelly for some time. But now I don�t need to write it because Hornsby has summed it up so succinctly: It�s just that there�s this song I heard on the radio, and I bought the CD, and now I have to hear it ten or fifteen times a day�.� And the question is, why? Hornsby poses Dave Eggers� suggestion that we need to �solve� the song. There�s something that sounds right about that, but the statement does not illuminate the process. I frequently have this kind of reaction to songs, inevitably the most trivial, least complex songs I listen to. Why?

While I�ve been thinking about this, I have also been preparing my off-textbook readings for my course, which include a couple of Marxist music philosophers, Theodor Adorno (sorry, M.!) and Walter Benjamin, both of whom express anxiety about the reproducibility of contemporary art forms and the resultant lack of uniqueness. Is it the lack of uniqueness that requires a solution through repetition? I wonder if it�s a way of acquiring ownership, of internalizing and separating the object from its medium, a way of raising it up. Then again, it could be a way of breaking it down. Still, when I listen to a Beethoven symphony or Monteverdi�s Orfeo or even a work closer in duration to that of a pop song, like a Debussy piano etude, even if I listen to it repeatedly, something different is happening. When I listen to one of these latter works, I feel like I�m listening for something, even if there�s not a particular problem I�m trying to solve, even if I�m listening for pure pleasure and not as part of my job. There is a clear separation between myself and the work. With the repeated pop songs, it�s more like I try to be part of the work, try to lose myself in it. This is exactly what Adorno, anyway, is worried about. He doesn�t want us to lose ourselves in listening. He wants us to find ourselves, something he feels pop music will never permit.

But there is certainly something about the unique that seems especially valuable. Despite mixed reviews of the success of Christo�s Gates, which are coming down from Central Park today, there is something exceptionally lovely about the project�s impermanence. Only a few can say they were there (an inherent elitism seems to be a necessary part of impermanent art). There�s nothing left but the memory and photos. The artwork itself is gone.

In the world of classical music, this role is filled by the live concert. While it is possible to listen to a recording of, say, Beethoven�s seventh symphony in your living room 24 hours a day, if you wish, such a performance will never vary (well, John Cage might argue that point � I am forced to mention this as a siren is currently passing by my house in the middle of the second movement � but I think you know what I mean). A live concert will never be quite the same as any other performance. Despite the fact that the recorded performers and the live performers are playing from the same music � they might even be the same performers � like snowflakes, no two performances are exactly the same. Live concerts can encourage excitement and engagement through their uniqueness and the visual aspect of the process. This is a quality I hope to take advantage of with my students next term. I�m trying to give them as much live music both in and outside the classroom as I possibly can. And yet I know they will study from recordings and will learn from them and master them and maybe even play them again after the course is over. At least I hope so.

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