The terrifying and exciting responsibility of being parents of a young pair of ears.

Recently, my family expanded from two early-30’s adults and an old dog to include a now-three-month-old baby. As a composer and performer I regularly make my helpless kid endure contemporary music concerts, choir rehearsals and the odd encounter with Beethoven and Mozart. But I wondered—what should my husband and I inflict on the baby’s innocent little ears at home on the stereo?

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I Was Taught To Hate.

The “modernists” were more or less taught to “hate” the minimalists, the then so-called “world music” inspired composers were looked down upon by many (for not holding to the “more sophisticated” concepts of western art music) and the new romanticism movement was seen as “pandering” to traditional audiences, returning us to the cliché sounds of earlier times (sorry for the plethora of “air quotes”).

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PLAY

We play music – at least, we do in the English language. Whether performing or listening, participating in music requires playing. The word play has so many other connotations and associations, giving the sense of a listener or performer interacting with the music, forming a relationship of curiosity and spontaneity.

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Wait for the Drop

So I’ve been a bit less attentive to this blog than I would have liked. Sorry! So many things to do…. so little time. I’ve also been teaching a couple of courses, including the History of Popular Music. That’s usually an opportunity for me to listen to some old favourites and re-contextualize the shifts in our industry—because this is not the first time the musical world has believed that “the sky is falling” because of shifts in technology.

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Obsessive Listening

Upon my return to New York City, iTunes informed me I’d listened to the album 17 times. That’s in addition to the band’s latest release, Malina, which came out while I was still at I-Park; another 25 plays. Over 42 hours of listening to two albums during five weeks on the road.
So much for omnivorous listening. More like obsessive listening.

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On My Sleeve

It is a quiet Saturday morning here in Verdun, just on the edge of Montreal. My arm is a little sore, not from the usual excessive drumming or gear hauling, but because a few days ago I got my first tattoo. It is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I bought the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Blood Sugar Sex Magik on double cassette in 1991. Looking at my tattoo today, I am reminded of the Chili Peppers’ album art filled with close-ups of the band members’ tattoos, the explicit lyrics and the music that blew my mind.

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Omnivorous listening without an iPod.

Omnivorous listening might seem to be a given in this day and age. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has suggested that it reached its zenith with the arrival of iPods, writing in 2004 “I have seen the future, and it is called Shuffle.” And certainly, tiny earbuds and equally-tiny portable music players (or as many people call them now, “phones”) have changed the way we listen in many ways.

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Repetitions, Pulses and Flow

In 2016, music critic Ben Ratliff published Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in An Age of Musical Plenty. He suggested that the use of language and terms referring to generalized human activity could open new ways of listening to music and musical engagement. Terms such as repetition, density or speed could help a listener navigate across different musical cultures and traditions.

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Furniture Music

When Pat Carrabré invited me to contribute to the Omnivorous Listening Blog I took the opportunity to have an unbiased look at my own listening habits, easily done through Apple Music’s recently played view. I adopted Apple Music as my primary listening hub about a year ago, and I now use it as a first stop for most of my listening, be it active or passive.

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The Paranoid Style

Argue’s “Secret Society” is an extensively rehearsed big band of 18 players, all conducted by the composer himself. iTunes categorizes the music as “Avant-Garde Jazz,” but I don’t think that label does justice to the many genres you are likely to hear on one of their albums. Like the best jazz, it can swing, but it also plays with new stylistic combinations, extended techniques and brilliant timbres. I really don’t know where the classical new music ends and the jazz begins.

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Omnivorous Listening

My initial thought upon hearing the term “omnivorous listener” was I might be a poster child for the idea. Since I first started interacting with music as a young child I found that my listening habits were almost always way outside the frameworks of most of my friends. A lot of that was informed by the fact that I grew up in Las Vegas in the late 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s and what that city was like then and the kinds of music that could be found there.

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There are No Listeners Here

When I looked it up, I found that the term omnivorous came from research attempting to establish a connection between socio-economic status and cultural habits, specifically the expansion of so-called high-brow musical preferences to include such “radical” genres as rock and jazz. More recent studies demonstrate a growing recognition that deep, ongoing, informed engagement with music encourages omnivorous listening.

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Sonus Novus/Sonus Vetus

I listen to all kinds of music: French chamber music, Schubert lieder, modern art music from Adès to Zwillich, and everything in between. I’m just as likely to listen to a Leonard Cohen album as I am to a Bach cantata, or Quebecois folk music, classic rock, jazz, or opera. I’ve been known to sing along with Handel’s Messiah on road trips but a Journey CD will meet the same fate, only louder. Part of the fun of music for me is the infinite variety of sounds available now.

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The Medium Is the Message

I thought I’d take the opportunity to pick up the thread
of an idea and see what others are thinking about the melding of audio and video—not just on the web, but also in the concert hall—and how our listening experiences are morphing because of this new contextualization. The fact that so many of us access music through a medium that links music to video has resulted in a growing expectation for musicians to “pump up” their recordings with added visual elements.

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Unexpected Juxtapositions

Every week, I look forward to a new installment of The Omnivorous Listener so I can read about what my friends and colleagues have to say about their own listening. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people who have careers in music might listen differently than others. I also wonder how a musicologist is supposed to listen?

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