On What to Listen for in Music

I find Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music hard to review — not because his writing is bad, but because I don’t know much about music. It’s all the more challenging because it was published in 1939, well before any music popular today; even “oldies” like Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, and Johnny Cash fall outside Copland’s canon. So the book is ultimately about classical music. Jazz makes a brief appearance, but there’s little else a contemporary listener would recognize — no rock, no pop, no country — and the only real point of reference for us might be film scores; there’s no Hans Zimmer here, but the concept remains. It divides into three sections: the parts of music, the forms of music, and the uses of music.

The parts weren’t too challenging, though I had to take my time: for Copland these are rhythm, melody, harmony, and tonal color, which come intuitively even to a casual listener, though the rigor he brings may be new. Even tonal color, the least familiar to me, made sense once I read it — an oboe has an entirely different “color” from a violin. Duh. The hardest section was on the fundamental forms: sonatas, fugues, scherzos. The terms may be familiar even to the unmusical, but their content isn’t, and I still don’t fully get them — this is a book that can’t be grasped by reading alone; it requires exposure to the music, and to his credit Copland provides a list of recommended listening for each form. The last section is on a few uses of music: opera, “modern” music, and film. In Copland’s day, opera was apparently looked down on by the musical elite (partly a reaction against Wagner), whereas today it’s again seen as an elite form, more recognizable to Europeans than to others. The “modern” music he discusses is largely what was written between the world wars, which would hardly be called modern now, and he scolds listeners who complain that it’s too dissonant — on the contrary, he says, they simply haven’t developed an ear for it. Finally, on film, his views very much still hold: film scoring is fundamental to the emotional experience of a film, and some of the best of it is the music the audience never even notices. Copland’s is a good, rudimentary introduction for anyone curious about classical music. I suspect it still carries weight in that world, even if it applies less to more recent genres — rhythm, melody, harmony, and tonal color remain fundamental, but the forms have shifted dramatically. It’s worth reading for anyone dipping their toes in for the first time.