Ways of Listening

‘Music is both too difficult and too easy to access,’ Nicholas Spice wrote recently in the LRB, ‘and it seems that we have opted to stick with ease over difficulty.’ On this episode he joins Thomas Jones to discuss some of the difficulties: of listening, of understanding, of maintaining the distance necessary for aesthetic contemplation, of playing and how that differs from performing. But engaging with the difficulty of music – learning to attend to it – doesn’t mean rejecting more immediate kinds of response. Keeping music alive, Nicholas also argues, requires an active involvement, an openness of engagement, that’s as likely to be found in a group of schoolchildren singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ as it is in a professional classical performance at a concert hall.

Read Nicholas Spice's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/spicelrbpod

From the LRB

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