When was the last time you really listened to music? I don’t mean putting it on in the background while you study, or as something to dance to at a party. When was the last time you put on an album, sat down, and just listened to it, appreciating not just the songs, but the way they fit together to create something so much bigger than the sum of its parts?

It’s nothing to be ashamed of if it doesn’t happen often. I rarely set aside time to listen to music myself. I’ll focus on music when I’m walking to and from class, or while I’m out on a late night drive, but at home my focus is almost always drawn somewhere else. Lately however, I’ve been questioning this practice. Why shouldn’t we devote the same amount of attention to music that we apply to other kinds of art? One can’t really appreciate a film if it is put on as background noise, and as hard as we might try, it’s still impossible to put a sculpture on in the background.

At home, it’s easy to relegate music to the background. We can throw it on for entertainment while we’re making dinner or getting ready for work in the morning. Experiencing music uses the only one of our senses that doesn’t require us to give it all of our attention, so we use that time to do other things we have deemed more productive.

Unfortunately when it comes to popular music, the live setting is often even less conducive to the listening experience.  Live classical concerts are different, the audience is expected to behave in a certain way, sitting in quiet contemplation of the performers until the piece ends. At a Jazz concert, one might applaud at a song choice, or after a particularly great solo, but the rest of the time is spent listening intently to the music. At a rock show, all bets are off, and we spend our time clapping, shouting, and dancing along with the music. We almost never simply sit and listen to the band, and when we do, the sound is often of such poor quality that it becomes impossible to discern one instrument from another; we end up experiencing the music more than we listen to it.

But is that really such a bad way to listen to live music? Well, no, it’s not – music can be experienced and appreciated in many different ways.  As Quincy Jones said of music during his keynote address at South By Southwest 2009, “You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can’t taste it, you can’t smell it, but lord knows you can feel it.” The problem comes from the fact that we are okay with making the  “feeling” of popular music more important than the music itself. This is the exact reason why the Beatles chose to stop performing live in 1966; it didn’t matter if they were putting on a great show, or playing worse than they ever had before, the fans still reacted the same way. The live experience is important, it’s why we pay to see a show instead of just buying a record, but it should not necessarily be valued over actually listening to the music.

In 1952, the American composer John Cage first presented his piece “4’33”,” a three movement composition, to the world. The audience filed into the recital hall, and pianist David Tudor took his seat on the piano bench before beginning the piece by closing the pianos lid. The room stayed silent until Tudor opened and closed the lid again to usher in the second movement, doing the same at the beginning of the third. Once the time the 4 minutes and 33 seconds were up, Tudor had not played a single note.

The composition was a stroke of genius.

In the minds of many, Cage had tricked them into going to a recital at which the performer did not perform. He had made them pay to listen to silence, something they were perfectly capable of doing on their own time.

What Cage had actually done, was tricked his attendees to actively listen. He had always been very vocal about the fact that music did not necessarily need to come from traditional instruments, or even use pitch. With “4’33”’ he had composed a piece where the sounds of the room became the music. The sound of someone coughing, of a chair squeaking, of rain falling on the recital hall’s roof, they became the instruments performing Cage’s composition. The audience, listening with the same concentration they would at a classical recital, ended up listening to raindrops and wind more intently than they had ever before in their life.

Cage would later call “4’33”” his most important composition, and to most scholars and fans, he would not be wrong. In less than 5 minutes, he had rewritten the definition music and made his audience listen attentively to things they had never listened to before. He had shown the world that if they really listened, one could get more from music than they ever had before.

This past June, while browsing through a record store in Bristol, UK, I stumbled across an original mono pressing of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles. It was cheap, really cheap, to the point where I couldn’t turn it down. Since I returned to B-town at the beginning of July, I hadn’t had the chance to play it, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was just afraid that it would sound terrible.

In doing my research for this essay, I decided to finally take the plunge and listen to Sgt. Pepper. I figured this would be the perfect album to devote my full focus to for a couple reasons; first of all, Sgt. Pepper was the album that solidified an album as an artistic statement, instead of focusing away on the individual songs and demonstrating that  a collection of songs could really be greater than the sum of all its parts. Furthermore, the album’s production is legendary. Rock critics and audiophiles agree that a mono pressing of Sgt. Pepper is one of the best produced records of all time, layered and rich in detail and nuance, such that the harder you listen, the more you will come away with. So after I went through my ritual of starting the record playing on the turntable, I turned off the lights in my room, and sat back to listen.

Within 20 seconds I was freaking out. Sound was only coming out of the right speaker. This didn’t make sense for a mono record, so I checked the connections all over my sound system, double checked the record’s serial number to make sure I hadn’t been duped into buying the stereo version, and began looking into new needles for my record player. About 10 minutes into my crisis, just as I was about to start rewiring my entire stereo system, I realized I had neglected to push the “mono” button on my preamplifier, and as such, the system was trying to route two signals when there was only one available. Finally I had the record spinning and sound coming from both speakers, and I leaned back to just listen.

It wasn’t easy to do; the closest thing I can compare it to is a form of meditation, trying to remove all extraneous thoughts from my head and focus exclusively on the music. Anyone who has tried to meditate knows how difficult this can be, and I found my focus being drawn to many other things. Any menial responsibility I had came creeping into my consciousness, along with random questions I was just sure Wikipedia had the answers to, and any small bit of light in the room became like a spotlight, trying to draw me away from the music.

Through all these distractions, I was ultimately able to force my focus back to the album. What I found was incredible; the band makes use of little touches to keep the listener in the world they worked so hard to create. As the sounds of a tuning orchestra drifted across the first few seconds of the record, I found myself in a concert hall, waiting for the orchestra to begin their performance of a symphony, when out of nowhere, I was hit over the head with what have to be some of the most raucus guitars in the history of recorded music. There is almost no gap between any of the songs, leaving me no way to escape from this vast world. Even when the side one ended and I had to flip the record, The Beatles quickly drew me back in with “Within You Without You,” George Harrison’s sitar masterpiece that evokes the psychedelic era so perfectly. When the album does finally come to an end, a huge E major chord plays on three pianos and a harpsichord, easing me out of this psychedelic landscape and back into my own world as the chord dissipates revealing sounds of the studio, left alone by the unseen hands that shaped this album.

The record itself is sonically supreme, and not just because each individual instrument, be it drums, guitars, or french horns, sounds perfect. What makes this record sound so good is the way everything fits together. It’s like a renaissance masterpiece; unless you lean in and stare, all the brush strokes are hidden from view, and even though you’re aware of the virtuosic talent that went into creating it, the artist has left no trace of their hand in the painting. If you are somehow able to listen to one track at a time, whether it’s Ringo’s drums or John’s angelic vocals on “A Day in the Life,” you will start to hear the human touches, but you also start to miss the point. The Beatle’s intent was not to show you everything they put into this record, they are trying to keep those vocals, instruments, and production tricks hidden. Rather they are showing you to experience the work as a whole; the individual pieces don’t matter, its the overall goal that is important.

With this idea in mind, I challenge you to do the same. Next time you are going to listen to music, don’t just throw it on while you do something else. Don’t put on a playlist, or shuffle songs from one artist. Pick an album you like, from a band you love, sit back and listen to it. See how the melody moves, how the rhythm drives the piece forward and helps shape the song, and how each song works to create something bigger than itself. If you treat the album for the work of art it actually is, and not simply something to keep you entertained while you get through your to-do list, I can guarantee you will come away with an experience unlike anything else.

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