Music

What Happens When Music Becomes Background Noise

Great music loses its power when it becomes just another soundtrack for distracted listeners.
What Happens When Music Becomes Background Noise
Handel’s Messiah is performed in 2016. Listening to a concert allows an audience to give full attention to the music. Courtesy of Pacific Symphony
Raymond Beegle
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The great Russian poet Apollon Maikov admonishes us to “listen with all your soul.” He wanted us to know the secrets nature might tell through the sounds of the wind, the forest, and the sea. But listening to great music promises even more: the “revelation higher than all wisdom and philosophy” that Beethoven spoke of.

In Handel’s time, listening with all one’s soul was a simpler matter than it is today. To hear a large orchestra and chorus was a great and rare occasion; his public heard “The Messiah” and deeply believed the words “Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth.” People knew that another performance wouldn’t take place for months, or even years. What they heard was different from what we hear, for they listened with Bach and Vivaldi in their minds, while we have the additional sounds of Brahms and Tchaikovsky in ours.

Raymond Beegle
Raymond Beegle
Author
Raymond Beegle has performed as a collaborative pianist in the major concert halls of the United States, Europe, and South America; has written for The Opera Quarterly, Classical Voice, Fanfare Magazine, Classic Record Collector (UK), and The New York Observer. Beegle has served on the faculty of the State University of New York–Stony Brook, the Music Academy of the West, and the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. He taught in the chamber music division of the Manhattan School of Music for 31 years.