Page 287 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

At the moment the United States runs an annual trade deficit of nearly half a trillion dollars; we import from, far more than we export to, nations such as China, Korea, and Japan. But one commodity that has taken hold around the world, and especially in the Far East, is Western classical and popular music. Take China, for example. Walk around the new Beijing international airport and what do you hear? Background music including Mozart’s serenade Eine kleine N♭achtmusik, Beethoven’s character piece Für Elise, and Chopin’s Nocturne in E major—all representing genres of music that we have studied in this book. Take a cab into the city and what blares on the radio? American-style pop music with a heavy guitar bass line and pulsating beat, with the lyrics sung in Chinese. Drive past Tiananmen Square and the tomb of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the founder of the Chinese Communist party, and to the next building; here sits a colossal new (2007) concert hall for the performance of Western-style sym- phonies and operas. Continue half a mile farther to the Central Conservatory of Music and its music shop; the main items for sale are violins and pianos (both Western instruments), scores of Western classical music, and reproductions of portraits of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.
The global hegemony of Western music has been made possible by one thing: the instant delivery of sound by means of compressed MP3 and MP4 files. Instead of waiting to hear a visiting Western orchestra, a college student in Seoul or Singapore can now stream a piece from Beat or Spotify, or view Yo-Yo Ma (see chapter-opening image) or Lang Lang play a Beethoven sonata on YouTube just as quickly as can an American or Canadian student. Asian students, too, walk through the streets wearing earbuds and listening to music on an iPhone (created and designed in the United States but manufactured in China). Tech- nology has made the expressive power of music speak to millions more than Beethoven, or anyone else ever imagined.
At a lunch in spring of 2013 your author posed the following question to composer John Adams (see Chapter 16): “What is this technological revolution— streaming free MP3 and MP4 files, for example—doing to you, the composer? How is it changing you and your music?” In response Adams chose to be optimis- tic: “Well, of course, it’s cutting into my bottom line—I’m losing royalties—and I’m losing parts of my pieces—these compressed files eliminate the details of my music. But I wouldn’t trade and go back to the old system—give up accessibility for better audio quality. My music is being heard by so many more people and I myself am listening to so many new kinds of music.” Low cost, universal ac- cessibility seems to be the direction of the future, for both music and education generally.
Throughout this book, we have tried to relate how, since the Middle Ages, Western classical music has come to acquire its distinctive features, how it changed from being music that we did things to (worshiped or danced, for example) and became music we listened to purely for enjoyment. Indeed, over the centuries, classical music grew to become one of the crown jewels of Western culture. Along with democracy, freedom of religion and speech, equality of the genders, and due process under the law, the high arts of the West, not least its music, constitute the cultural traditions of which Westerners can be most proud. Classical music is something worth supporting and preserving. You, attentive listener, are now equipped to do so.
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