Music from the Inside Out

Rob Kapilow is a genius. His book All You Have To Do Is Listen is the best I've found for explaining classical music to the likes of me.

Lots of people avoid classical music entirely, saying it's boring and has no plot. Others are more like me, listening contentedly (in the words of composer Aaron Copland) "on the sensuous plane ... for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself ... the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any way."

Kapilow says we can learn to listen to music for its "plot," if we want, and not just because it sounds good to us. (Of course, a lot of classical music doesn't sound that good, on purpose, because the composer had other ideas.) Yes, Kapilow says, classical music does have a storyline, just as a movie or soap opera does. Though it's a musical storyline, not a verbal one, it uses sonic equivalents to words, phrases, sentences, and larger verbal structures.

The secret is to be told how to listen for the "vocabulary" the composer is using: how the composer constructs a narrative arc, as it were, out of such building blocks as musical motives, phrases, and periods.

Here's an example from the book, which can also be found as Chapter 3, Example 15 here:






In Carnival of the Animals, Camille Saint-Saëns uses the first five notes in the top staff of the score as a pattern (a "motive") which gets repeated two more times in quick succession, first with its notes lowered (transposed) in pitch; then moved even lower, and with the intervals between the pitches somewhat enlarged. Then near the conclusion of this musical "phrase" there are four "repeated notes" and then one slightly lower note. At the very end is a single concluding chord in the lower three instruments.

The ear hears the two repetitions of the opening motive as such — as repetitions, that is — even if they go by too fast for the mind to say as much, and even if they are not precisely identical to the opening motive itself.

But, says Kapilow, the mind can train itself to say, very quickly, "Aha! The multiple repetitions of the opening few notes, albeit transposed and varied somewhat, mean something: that that pattern of notes is a musical idea which Saint-Saëns intends to impress upon his audience. Having done that through repetition, he can then contrast the opening motive with the tail end of his musical phrase. The tail end sounds like a way to end the musical phrase because of how Saint-Saëns began the phrase. Another beginning would not have worked with that ending."

In much the same way, a TV show's plot has an ending that necessarily goes with the story's beginning ... it is potentiated by the beginning. We are all experts, are we not?, at having some idea of how a TV show can be expected to end, even before we have seen the ending.

With music, most of us today can't predict much of the musical "plot" beyond, say, the next four to eight measures. Given that the average symphony lasts longer than the average soap opera episode, we feel hopelessly lost when we listen to classical music. We feel it has no plot, and we get bored.

Kapilow shows how we can listen, instead, to classical music "from the inside out," allowing ourselves to become fully aware of what the composer is trying to say, musically — of what he expects his audience to be able to decipher and understand ... and even anticipate happening half an hour later, at the end of the symphony.

Yes, it takes work to learn. But Kapilow has been delivering his advice to receptive audiences for some twenty years now, first with his What Makes It Great? programs on National Public Radio and more recently with talks at such places as Lincoln Center and via CDs and podcasts. Many thousands of people have come to understand classical music at his hands. Now I'm one of them ...