iPod, you Pod, what's up with the iPod?
Q: Question for music professor Ted Buehrer '91: Is the iPod revolutionizing the way we listen to music?
A: The iPod hasn't revolutionized my personal listening all that much, but more and more it is enhancing the teaching that I do. I can dump an entire reserve list for a course on my iPod and have it at my fingertips, rather than just the CDs I happened to bring with me to class. Or I can have all of, say, Miles Davis's recordings loaded on my iPod, and during the course of a jazz history lecture, without knowing in advance that I would end up referring to a specific recording, I can retrieve a particular track and play it for the class in response to a student question.
I have to say that, with an iPod, it's a lot easier to create a mood with music and let that be what you're listening to in the background as you go about your day. You can almost instantly create a mix for working out, a mix for going to sleep, a mix to dance to. I'm not sure this phenomenon is really that different from how music has been experienced in various forms over the years. In Mozart's day, attending an opera performance was not unlike attending a modern-day baseball game. Yes, there's a game happening on the field, but for many, going to a ball game is a social event where conversation takes place, food is consumed--the event itself is not necessarily the primary focus for everyone. In Mozart's serious operas, members of the audience would talk, play chess, and otherwise be distracted during the recitatives, and pay attention only during the arias. So this notion of music as "background" is not new.
Most of my purchases are CDs, but it can sometimes be easier and cheaper to find more obscure jazz and classical recordings on vinyl. Given the choice between a recording on vinyl and a modern digital recording, I'll choose the digital version every time. Still, I don't mind the hiss or the background noise from a turntable, because I'm listening for very specific things. When I listen to Clifford Brown, for example, I'm listening for the development of his improvisational ideas as his solos unfold, even as I'm listening for the ways in which his tone differs from trumpeters like Wynton Marsalis or Dizzy Gillespie or Terrence Blanchard or Roy Hargrove. It's impossible to take it all in during a single "hearing," which is one of the best things about good music: you can experience something new every time you encounter it.
For students, this intense form of paying attention can be a revelation. They'll say to me, "I've never listened to music this way before!" They haven't listened as specifically, or perhaps in a way that is that focused or directed. Igor Stravinsky once said: "To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
Ted Buehrer '91 is an associate professor of music who teaches theory, composition, and jazz history. An active composer himself, he is also Kenyon's expert on computer technology and music.
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