At the Marlboro Music School and Festival this summer, my fellow musicians and I spent an evening listening to historical recordings, an annual tradition. We ended with the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet (Op. 127), performed by the Busch Quartet, refugees from Hitler’s Germany.
This music is as profound as can be. From the first notes, I was in tears. Time was suspended, and nothing else existed. When it ended, I quietly left the room. Making polite conversation would have brought me back to earth; I wasn’t ready.
What I had experienced was complete immersion into music.
Most of life’s great moments are like this. We give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity. Past disappointments and future worries evanesce, allowing us to take in the present in its totality.
But in today’s frenetic world, such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is.
Our digital existence conspires to fracture our attention, barraging us with more information in less time than the human mind was designed to absorb. One recent morning, I took a break from my daily practice and turned my phone on. A cacophony of dings directed me first to messages across four different platforms, then to an urgent news alert about an event half the world away that I was powerless to do anything about. Ten minutes later, I returned to the piano. But I was so distracted that after half an hour, I wasn’t entirely sure what I had been playing when I started. I gave up and went to exercise.
All sorts of people more qualified than I — sociologists, political scientists and media critics — have addressed the pernicious effects of social media and algorithmic marketing on our society and psyches. But I can testify that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus.
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The post Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven. appeared first on New York Times.
