I want to say a small thing about a big subject, music. I’m going to put together two anecdotes because they are important to me even if they don’t go, by which I mean they aren’t connected or an extension of each other.
The first has to do with a conversation with the great opera soprano Beverly Sills. This was in the early 2000s, in Manhattan, at a luncheon that I think was a fundraiser or friend-maker for the Metropolitan Opera, of which she was chairwoman.
I’d never met her but we were seated together and the program was long and we settled in and pretty soon we were going from the wonders of opera to the purpose of music, what it does and what it’s supposed to do. I think we were both surprised by this: Music doesn’t have to have a purpose. But I found myself saying that deep down I think music is a stairway God gives us to get to him. Science is a stairway too, as are all the arts, and at the top of the stairway is truth and the truth is God. She was startled by this. So was I! I don’t think I had fully understood I thought that.
But yes, I believe that when a moment of truly sublime artistic or scientific excellence occurs, the veil between this world and the other thins a little, and we almost see something. That’s why we take to our feet and stomp and cheer and shout when something beautiful happens in a theater or hall, it’s why we stop the show, because we sense there’s something beyond human perfection going on. I think it’s why we get choked up when we see a magnificent moment on the playing field, also. You sense when the Holy Ghost, the big speckled bird, is making an unaccustomed flight over Citi Field. (We use that term in honor of Johnny Cash, who once said, “When the Holy Ghost is in the music, people feel it. You don’t have to explain it.”)
I badly want to tell you Beverly Sills’s response to all this, but I don’t remember what she said, I kept no notes, I recall only her wonderful face, full and strong, merry, and her look of engagement. She was processing a surprising thought from a stranger. I suppose I was telling her that to me her life was even more constructive than she thought, and she must have thought it was pretty constructive.
Anyway, that was a great moment, getting to tell Beverly Sills what I think music is.
The second anecdote is also from a conversation, at a professional gathering in Arizona in the fall of 2023. One night at dinner I sat across from a brilliant and accomplished young man in his 40s who writes music, including movie scores. He was from Los Angeles, chic and hip and thoughtful. I shared a recent favorite score, the one written by John Adams for Luca Guadagnino’s “I Am Love.” Then our talk took a turn. For a while I’d puzzled over something and hadn’t had anyone with his background and expertise to ask about it.
I said I love music, have all my life, and I guess I know the entire American songbook circa 1880 to 2000-something—know my Cole Porter, my Gershwin, my Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach, my Broadway shows, my Sondheim. I love rock and pop, can recite the lyrics of Kesha and enjoy, when being asked how I am, responding that I wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. Yet sometime around 2005 or 2010 I stopped absorbing new music. My memory didn’t hold new songs anymore. I was guessing that the reason is that my brain’s music storage unit is filled. It has enough, a lifetime’s worth, and doesn’t need more. Or, and possibly there are studies on this, at a certain point the brain’s memory neurons start to crowd out the new-experience neurons, and . . .
“No. That’s not it,” he said as he shook his head. It was clear he’d been thinking about this. He said the reason I am not absorbing and holding music now is that at the time I stopped listening, popular musicians stopped doing melody. They stopped doing the tune. They did other things, they kept the rhythm, the beat, but they started shunting aside melody. That, he said, is why you stopped keeping it.
And I thought: Oh my, that’s true. And it seemed the reason he cared is that he missed the melody too.
Rhythm is felt, the beat is felt, but melody is both thought and felt, so it has two ways to enter you.
I thanked him for helping me, told him I thought he observed correctly, and have been pondering what he said ever since.
The past two years it became a thought of broader application—that maybe as a nation we’ve kept the beat, we’ve still got the rhythm, but the melody, the tune—this century hasn’t been about those gentle things. We haven’t been about them.
Maybe others, even the primary audience for popular music, are coming to miss it too. I keep hearing of the children and grandchildren of friends who seem to be listening a lot to the music of past decades.
There are Reddit threads on this. A typical post: “As my kids are getting older, I’m realizing more and more that they seem to prefer music from the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s than they do from current music. I know this isn’t a new phenomenon, as we listed to stuff from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but I feel like when we did it, it was just supplementing our generation’s modern music. With kids, and their friends, so I know it’s not just mine, it’s like all they really want to listen to is older stuff. . . . I never hear them listening to any modern pop (Taylor Swift being the big exception).”
Another post, different thread: “Pop songs from the 50s have a certain lilt to them—a certain undertone of satisfaction with life.” Another: “Pop music from the 80s is charged with optimism as well as soundboard experimentation . . . an undertone of eagerness for what is to come.”
From another thread, a post on being dragged to a karaoke night. “The crowd was at least 60% under 25, and in 3 hours, only two contemporary pop songs were sang.”
Someone noted that all this isn’t necessarily a turning away from current pop songs, it’s technological: Everything from every era is available on streaming services, it’s easy now to discover other eras and fall in love with them.
But I suspect the young are hungry for melody. And perhaps this is a hunger too for God, for a connection with something beyond that only a well crafted, fully felt song can provide. Music isn’t only organized sound shaped in time to spur human feeling, it isn’t only a gift, it comes from a place. A nation’s music comes from that nation’s deepest self—its culture, its society, its understanding of itself and of life.
If our era’s artists have been moving away from melody and tune this century, then maybe that means something, implies something about the larger American picture, with all its broken-upness, political and otherwise. Maybe we ought to think about that.