Your desert island symphony

In my Western Art Music seminar (a writing seminar, might I add), we started the term with the early symphony – a little Sammartini, a little Stamitz, some Martinez, a bit of Haydn. The focus was on social history. But to bring it forward in time, I’ve done three things, and it’s really paying off!

First, as an in-class short-writing exercise, I gave them a 3x5 card, and asked them what *later* symphony they’d take with them as their only music for three years on a desert island, and why. Then I let them add a second piece that they thought would impress their studio instructor or other faculty mentor. (This is how I take class roll; it’s also how I get them thinking about how things apply to their broader musical lives.)

The next day, I put them in small groups and reminded them of some of the “desert island” pieces they chose, then ask their groups to create a chronological timeline of TEN post-Haydn symphony composers, without computers and without phones. There was a good bit of laughter. Now who came before that? Who was that composer they played last semester? Did such-and-so count as a symphony? We put those lists on the board, and looked at commonalities across all the lists, and who was missing. It was interesting fodder for the “who decides” discussion:

We had read the Donne UK report (scroll past the proms report; the one on symphony repertoire is down below: Equality & Diversity in Global Repertoire, 2023/2024 Season) – so they’re definitely starting to see patterns in their world. So that discussion got rich and interesting.

And then the storm hit, and we’ve been out of classes for a week. So rather than have them go off and do something on Machaut with no context, no background, and no guiding framework, I canceled our Machaut assignment and moved them back to our desert island:

Okay, here we are in the world. Take 45 - 60 - 90 minutes and listen to one of those symphonies you mentioned as brilliant, desert-island, must-engage works. Voxer me with the three things that gave you shivers (or annoyed you) the most. Focus on the longer works: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Stravinsky, etcetera. How does your chosen work draw on things we saw with our "early symphony" exemplars? How does it take the basic symphonic ideas we saw in Sammartini, Haydn, and Martinez, and turn them into something bigger, stranger, or more intense?

The report-outs have been lovely. Several went for Tchaikovsky symphonies (which I think is weird, but I’m only the instructor), and most of them have spoken to the satisfaction of really listening to something they’ve wanted to get to know or to re-encounter. And the world is a better place when we stop and remind ourselves of what we love and what we came to do.

For me, that’s been the real gift of this little experiment: not the lists or the timelines, but watching students slow down long enough to hear why a piece mattered to them in the first place. In a semester full of deadlines and disruptions, that kind of listening feels quietly radical. Music makes our lives better; it’s nice to see them remember that.

So go and listen to whatever first drew you to music once upon a time. May it bring you comfort now.

Listening to the Birds

Tufted titmouse with a call-out saying tweetle tweetle tweetle

In What the Robin Knows, Jon Young suggests that we all follow the practice of sitting and actively listening to birds. He observes that the world birds share with us – that we share with the birds – can be understood through the acoustical signals they send. There’s a background level of noise that is standard, the so-called baseline, and there are the alarm calls and sudden silences that tell us about the “happenings” that the birds are experiencing – ones we can share if we’re paying full attention to their signals. Is that alarm call about us, walking obliviously through the woods, or is it about the nearby fox that we won’t see unless we pay attention?

Paying attention is a challenge, of course. He talks about beginning listeners, and the differences between their experience of soundscape (my word, not his) versus those of more experienced attendees. A bit of explanation first: he uses the term “sit spot” to characterize a place outdoors where one goes to meditate listen repeatedly over time. He recommends these be convenient to the household to encourage frequent practice. 

To get at the idea of what listening is, he first gives instructions, and then contrasts two listeners. The task is a simple one: “Listen to the silence and hear all the sounds around you. There will be many in your sit spot.” The results are quite varied:

I always find it instructive to ask new people how many airplanes they heard while sitting in their sit spots. “Three?” one might say hesitantly, after a pause. I may have asked a more experienced individual with a nearby sit spot to be sure to pick up the planes. I turn to her and say, “How many?” “Seven,” she replies. “No way! I can hear a plane. There were three,” the new student argues. “No, there were seven.” The next day, I put that same student in charge of counting planes in his sit spot, and his count goes up. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

Young’s point is that listening isn’t passive—it’s a skill developed over time. Noticing all the layers of sound, even silence, is part of the task:

I like differentiating between the sounds made by the wind as it flows through the branches, the shrubs, the grass – all of them different… Even in the bedroom in the dead of night, there’s plenty to hear. Silence itself has a sound, and listening to it is good practice for picking up the junco’s tiny tunes and alarms. (Young, 2012, p. 59)

He calls for us to adopt what he characterizes as the “Routine of Invisibility,” using an observer’s amble rather than the destination-focused stride of the hiker. This, he argues, will give us more grounding in what is happening within our sphere of observation, since we will avoid becoming that obnoxious thing, the “bird plow” that drives the birds upward toward safety as we move forward into their space. He also makes a strong case for the “interspecies alarm system,” where the listening birds will respond differently (as a group) to the tense, stressed coyote needing to feed its young than to the more relaxed coyote out on an amble – and where the signal that one group of listening birds sets off will be picked up by altogether different species in ways that tend to make all the song-bird species safer. (Unless, of course, there’s a “wake hunter,” the raptor coming along to pick off one of the disturbed birds while it’s distracted. It’s a jungle out there.)

In all, I enjoyed the book, but as my dad says, Young’s notion of the sit spot is not a practice that I’m likely to adopt. My precious outdoor minutes are probably better spent on the walking that keeps me healthy than on the listening stance, if only because it encourages an outdoor stillness that too closely reflects the indoor stillness of the writer’s daily life. But I’ll certainly use Young’s idea of the variability in bird calls – the companion check versus the song vs the adolescent “feed me” demands – as well as his idea of tending to the baseline sounds as part of my outdoor practice. 

And as a musicologist, I firmly agree with his ideas that we should all listen to ALL the sounds that we find ourselves immersed in. Awareness, self-discipline, and attentive practice shape how we hear the world. And that’s a takeaway I can get behind.

Young, Jon. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Mariner Books, 2012/r2013.