|
************ |
How Do You Listen?
Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven.
You can tell a lot about a people by how they listen to music. Consider the evolution of musical reproduction. In the beginning there simply was no reproduction. The only way to experience music was to be present when it was played. All the glory of improvisation and risk of error hung in the balance and the purity of note from instrument to ear was irrevocably real. Who doesn’t remember discovering as a child that “live music” held a power and ability to capture the imagination that was far superior to anything recorded.
But not too long (in celestial terms) after the first cave man rapped his stick upon the base of a hollow tree and smiled deliriously, man figured out how to reproduce sound when Thomas Edison created the mechanical cylinder recorder in 1887. Suddenly the race was on and by the early 1900’s Edison had sold millions of his units. Most of us know the lineage of musical recording and playback devices that followed: Gramophone – Phonograph – Vinyl Record – 8 Track Tape – Cassette Tape – CD, and of course, today’s methods including WAV and ATRAC technologies reproduced by MP3, iPod and other digital players. It can get a little “techie” these days - and it does.
I was born smack dab in the middle of the vinyl record era and have several friends who still have garages and closets packed with the things. It’s simply hard to part with the original music of our youth, even when we’ve already replaced it in every format to come out since. Vinyl was great but its drawbacks were obvious – big, heavy, easily scratched and thus permanently destroyed. But as such it made you “careful” with the music – the disc in your hand became something fragile and holy that needed to be treated with respect. If a friend handled your Led Zeppelin album carelessly he was likely to be quickly corrected, “Dude – the disc is more important than you are . . . Calmly put it in the sleeve and just back away . . .”
Eight track tapes were up next and were thankfully short lived. Ford produced one for their 1973 Country Squire Station Wagon that along with some of the most horrific music that has ever been reproduced for a teenager’s ear (Barry Manilow, Wayne Newton etc.) had buried right in the middle of it all, George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.” (Surely the result of some revolutionary VP at Ford who was likely fired for his effort.) It was cool water in a very parched landscape for my brothers and I.
“C’mon Dad – play track four again . . .Pleeeeease . . .”
Next came the cassette era. These were great in many ways (smaller, didn’t scratch, you could keep 5000 in your car) but they lacked the ability to quickly move between songs when desired. Users were condemned to interminable minutes of rewinding, forwarding and blindly searching for the beginning of the preferred tune. The pops, crackles and skips of vinyl were gone, so they seemed to be worth it, but in retrospect they weren’t. I must have spent nearly four figures replacing my music collection in audio cassettes, just in time to have the Compact Disc hit the market in 1983.
CD’s were indeed “compact,” relatively tough to scratch and brought back the ability to rapidly jump from song to song. They were also billed as able to maintain their sound integrity for all eternity which at least made replacing our collections seem once again worthwhile. They are still, of course, widely used but have declined tremendously in sales as Internet downloading to iPod and MP3 players has taken over the market.
But while much has changed in the technology over the years, the actual experience of sitting down and enjoying one’s music really hasn’t. Sure, we can take our music on the go now by strapping an iPod to our arm as we run, but my Grandfathers old “Mathis Hi-Fi” could stack 140 minutes worth of LP’s atop its spindle (more than a standard CD) and play back Beethoven’s 7th with a sound quality that approached near digital clarity.
The biggest difference today is that we can now download only those songs we choose, usurping the musician’s ability to paint a broader canvas with multiple songs in a collection. And I think most of us would agree that many of the groups and artist we have enjoyed over the years would be severely diminished in their importance if we had never heard the full scope of their work.
What do Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise,” The Righteous Brother’s “Unchained Melody,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May,” The Beatle’s “Revolution,” and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” all have in common? They were all “B-Side” tunes that likely never would have been discovered in todays “download what’s hot” approach to music.
Which is a good reminder for life – by staying comfortably in control of what “reaches us” and by basing the flow of information and ideas on what’s popular in the world alone, we often, if not always, derail the would-be work of God’s Spirit in our lives. And usually in the way He seems most inclined to approach us - that is to say the “unexpected” and surprisingly fresh moment that we just never saw coming.
How do you hear the music? Or perhaps better said, how willing are you to hear?
There is simply no substitute for listening with open and not necessarily expectant ears.
So go spin up something off an old “B-Side” and enjoy the ride!
- Stuart