The art of listening is governed by Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Rhyme and repetition are tools of memory, and by bearing in mind what has gone before we are able to anticipate what is to come.
Think for a moment of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: one of the most recognizable statements in all classical music—da, da, da, DAA; da, da, da, DAA—fortissimo, unison. The repeated rhythm alone would identify the piece for most listeners. The second four-note group also rhymes with the first, although they are not identical; the second group is a step lower and where the interval between the third da and the DAA in the first group is a major third, it is a minor third in the second. What Beethoven gives us, instantly and irrevocably, is the means by which to make sense of an entire span of music. The opening gestures form the material of the first subject of the movement’s sonata form and remain present in the bass even during the unfolding of the more lyrical second subject. Beethoven plays with this material throughout the movement—he changes the pitches and the intervals, he turns it upside down and elides it—but because we remember its source, we can orient ourselves; we become present because our memory allows us to look forward and to imagine the completion of the gesture from its start. Memory also enables us to be surprised and delighted by the delayed gratification when, instead of three das, Beethoven gives us nineteen (!) before reaching DAA. (Beethoven is the great champion of pushing things to their limits: in one quirky song, Ein Selbstgespräch—“A Monologue”—he sets the word ich fifty times.)
This involvement of the listener—the demand that the listener has work to do—seems to me to be a fundamentally important part of the experience of music. The expectations set up by rhyme and repetition encourage an active participation; we can guess what might be coming next even in music we are hearing for the first time. And remember that before the invention of audio recording, people were always encountering music for the first time. Johann Sebastian Bach performed the St. John Passion just four times in his life, each time in a different version, reaching an audience of perhaps two thousand people in total. If you weren’t in Leipzig for one of those performances, you would not have had another chance to hear it in your lifetime.
Perhaps that is why Bach chose to play so radically with his audiences’ expectations: to make sure they were paying attention. The whole of the John Passion is full of subversion and irony, but the greatest example comes in the final soprano aria, Zerfliesse, mein Herze (“Melt, my heart”). It seems that we are in a standard da capo aria—the conventional form, ABA, for arias in opera and oratorio in Bach and Handel’s time. Rhyme and repetition are in place:
Zerfließe, mein Herze, in Fluten der Zähren
Dem Höchsten zu Ehren
Erzähle der Welt und dem Himmel die Not:
Dein Jesu ist tot!
Melt, my heart, in floods of tears
In honor of the highest
Tell the world and the heavens the anguish:
Your Jesus is dead!
We get an instrumental introduction with solo flute playing the melody that the soprano will take over; we then hear the sung A section of the text with internal repeats, and this is completed by a play-out from the instruments. The B section takes place conventionally in the relative major key, again with internal repeats, and we start on the da capo with the original instrumental introduction, only this time the soprano interrupts as if to say, “No, you don’t understand! Your Jesus is dead!”—interjecting the last line of the B section to shout out the shocking enormity of what has happened to the crucified man. Only then can the da capo resume, returning us to the (changed) world with a new understanding of the necessity of those tears.
In an age of instantly accessible music, when we can listen to the John Passion while doing the washing up and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony whilst driving to the shops, it is all too easy to take these pieces for granted and not notice what is being said. But the greatest music demands attention. Its rewards come from a listening that is not merely passive but alert and imaginative, that gives as well as takes.
As Bart Simpson once said about another art form: “C’mon people! This poetry isn’t gonna appreciate itself!”
Author Note, as in: Bert Keizer is a doctor and philosopher who works with geriatric patients in Amsterdam. The author of Dancing with Mister D, he is currently at work on a philosophically tinged account of neurosurgery.
