Listening Beneath Musical Style

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leon Kirchner

Here I tell you about my encounter with the deepest listener I’ve met and how it changed my musical perspective forever.

Have you had an “Aha!” experience listening to a piece when suddenly,  you “got” it? Please share your story on this blog. 

3.   Listening Beneath Musical Style

I survived “probation” at Harvard, protected by my new teacher. Or perhaps I was his penalty. He too was on a kind of probation. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Leon Kirchner had lost a battle in academic in-fighting and was restricted to working only with undergrads. Except for me. I was his only graduate student. Academia, gotta love it! But I digress.

Kirchner’s ears are the deepest I’ve ever encountered. His composition seminars were events outside of time. I’ll try to describe them…

We all hunch over the piano, straining to see the manuscript of a student playing through a new piece. Then silence. Usually a long silence. Then Kirchner asks our opinion… I still kind of quake remembering the peril that moment held for all of us, especially the first to speak up!  

Eventually, Kirchner shares his own opinion. That’s not quite right. He starts talking, but not about music. He’s sharing some recent discovery or controversy he read about in genetics, or physics, or linguistics. In the most surprising fashion, he connects these cosmic inquiries to moments in Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Schoenberg, etc…Such ideas stirred our imagination for months and years afterwards… Now back in the class he makes a sharp sudden turn and brings up the student composition. We had all forgotten it! He hadn’t. In the sharpest detail, he points out its strengths, weaknesses, and necessary purpose—all related to the science and music examples he had conjured out of the invisible ethos of that dingy classroom.

But here’s the point: he never criticizes the music for its language; he never criticizes its style. It might be steeped in experimentalism, structured in the arithmetic of serialism, repeating with the rock beats of minimalism, or literally imitating the style of Richard Strauss. Didn’t matter. He hears each piece in its own universe and only cares if it fulfills its own musical destiny successfully. 

That’s the key, my friends, to become a confident, expert music listener who can feel the expression and follow the story in any piece of music, regardless of its style or genre. Ah, but how can we “mere mortals” achieve this? To be continued…