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November 2024  (Revised from the blog post The Opening Chord of June 2011)

I’ve been writing posts for this blog for over fourteen years. Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually reads them! I thought that I’d like to once again republish my very first post of June of 2011 with some new edits. I admit that I republished this post once before in 2014 … but that was ten years ago! This post remains important to me because it recounts when I first noticed that some people actually listen to music – something I’d been doing since age four and a half – and some people just hear music as a sonic-wallpaper accompaniment to their other thoughts and activities.

When people talk about classical music, they sometimes use descriptive prose. “This music is like being beside beautiful waterfall.” Or, “This symphony feels like I’m standing on a mountaintop, viewing the magnificent valley below.” From descriptions like these, we may be able to get a sense of how a certain piece of classical music feels to that particular individual. But since childhood, I have been obsessed with a very basic question: Why do some people listen – that is, consciously decide to give music their total, undivided attention? Years later I began to have some related questions. Is it life-changing or life-enhancing to learn how to listen to music? Does learning to listen perceptively to classical music affect any other aspects of one’s life? If so, are there specific teaching methodologies that can be employed to encourage this kind of behavior? At Abraham Lincoln High School in Philadelphia, I would learn the answers to these questions.

My first awareness of this listening versus hearing issue occurred when I was nine. I was attending St. Peter’s Episcopal Choir School for Boys in Philadelphia, a school modeled after the cathedral choir schools of England. The choir school no longer exists, but has since become an independent coeducational, private day school – and a flourishing one at that! In 1957, there were about forty boys in the student body, grades four through nine. That made for excellent teacher-to-student ratios – one teacher for perhaps five to eight students. It was like being tutored. Both the music and academic subjects in the curriculum were demanding. Mandatory Latin and French, mandatory piano lessons and sight-singing class, mandatory public speaking (!), and religious education – in addition to English, math, science, and history. Every day there was a 45-minute choral rehearsal after school, two rehearsals on Friday, and two rehearsals on Sunday – one before each of the two services sung every Sunday, September through early June.

It was at those services we sang in St. Peter’s Episcopal Church at 3^rd and Pine Streets that I first noticed – it. We’d be singing some amazingly beautiful, moving choral composition by Bach or Palestrina or Rachmaninoff … and during measures when I was not singing but counting rests, my eyes would furtively scan the congregation. One of the clergy of the parish sometimes appeared to be bored. Some parishioners were busy reading the church bulletin; others had even dozed off! No one ever conversed during those services, as frequently happens in religious ceremonies and sadly even at concerts today … but, I did notice that some people were hanging on every note we sang with rapt attention. Who were these people? And why were they listening to the music – an amazingly emotionally rewarding behavior I had discovered earlier in my life?

I didn’t know it at the time, but my life’s work was being formed and shaped.