The Joys of Tuning In

Had to go for a 30-minute (one-way) drive this morning, and I decided to give my nerves a rest from talk radio and podcasts. So I pulled up, on my phone, a piece of classical music that I have loved for forty years, that I own on CD, and that I could listen to any time I wanted on my phone – but I don’t. Something about my attention span. Keep that in your pocket, because we will revisit it shortly (pun intended).

As I listened to this piece – Charles Gounod’s Petite Symphonie – I remembered with a smile the first time I ever heard it. It was during a summer vacation at some point in my teens, and I was bored. The weather outside was scorching, TV reruns had grown stale, and I decided to slake my ennui by rummaging through my father’s collection of records. Not the document type – the vinyl kind. My father had hundreds upon hundreds of LPs, with music ranging from swing (Benny Goodman) to jazz (Louis Prima) to crooners (Frank Sinatra) to Broadway (Carousel) to standards (Judy Garland) to pop (Carpenters). But the largest category by far was classical. He had albums of every period from late Renaissance (Monteverdi) to mid-20th century (Copland).

Looking back, I’m rather stunned at the persistence with which I combed through these recordings. I could not have listened to every single one – there must have been some self-prescribed filtering device I employed to weed out the ones I deemed of lesser interest: maybe I was drawn to music that featured the instruments I played or my vocal range, or maybe the cover was interesting. I really don’t remember. But I listened to a great many of them, particularly the classical recordings. If my parents weren’t home, I would listen to them on my father’s living room stereo system (which would remind you of the 1950s-style computers that filled an entire room); if my parents were in the house, I would take albums to my room and listen to them on my little monaural record player.?

And that is how I stumbled upon Gounod’s Petite Symphonie.?

Putting on a recording of a thirty-minute symphony is a commitment. Nowadays, I won’t even commit to reading a three-minute op-ed piece on matters of national significance (although I regularly ask my followers to read pieces of much greater length ??). But back in the day, I would put on an album and listen to music – in this case, classical, with no words – for half an hour. Forget walking uphill to school in the snow, barefoot? – I listened to classical music for thirty whole uninterrupted minutes. And then, if I had enjoyed it, I would listen to it again. I did this with not just a handful of albums but with dozens and dozens. Top that.?

As I drove along this morning, I thanked my lucky stars that I had been afflicted with Summer Vacation Boredom. Left to my own devices, I had poked around until I found my father’s record collection. I was already an inquisitive kid with a love of music, but having to fall back on my own resources (or at least Dad’s) for entertainment introduced me to some of the most beautiful music in the world and exercised my attention span (which clearly has atrophied over the decades).?

This is a cautionary tale, however. Depending on the circumstances, a child could just as easily stumble upon a parent’s inappropriate reading materials… or the liquor cabinet… or drugs… or a gun. This potentiality makes a great case for secretly stashing things around the house that you really want a child to find, or at least hope they’ll show an interest in if they stumble upon them? – a doll dressed as a historical character, a classic children’s novel, an unusual jigsaw puzzle, a box of oil pastels, a compass… or a collection of records. This won’t happen if you don’t have the right things hidden in plain sight. Sadly, even if you do, they’re competing with digital technology. ??

As I drove home this afternoon, I chose Gabriel Faure’s Requiem. This was also a piece that entered my repertoire because I was willing to invest time in listening to the entire thing (c. forty minutes). It was the early aughts, and I had just begun officially homeschooling. For our music studies, I purchased a variety of CDs of music representing different instruments, genres, time periods, etc. While I was at it, I treated myself to the Requiem CD because it included Faure’s “Cantique de Jean Racine,” which I had sung with the university choir in college and which was (and remains) one of my favorite works. One evening I was cleaning the kitchen and desperately needed something to counter the tedium. I put on the Faure CD – and proceeded to listen to the Requiem probably three or four times.?

So even as recently as twenty years ago, I had the ability and the motivation to focus my attention on music for an extended period of time. The obvious question now is: what’s changed? I already know the answer: the Internet.?

Honestly, the thought of trying to undo what has happened to my attention span – and to my priorities – is almost unbearably disheartening. I feel powerless… I feel ashamed of myself… and I feel, well, conflicted, because I very much want to have my cake and eat it, too.?

But listening to those two pieces of music today – that my contemporary self would be too impatient to seek out – gave me a glimpse of what my shortened attention span hath wrought and what it’s costing me.?

#music #attentionspan #internet #gounod #faure