Letters: An Appreciation

As most of my friends could tell you, I’m a pretty active user of social media. My tumblr may not be the most prolific out there, but anyone I follow could tell you the frequency with which I like and reply to posts. I’m all over Facebook, and I’m thinking about signing up for Twitter. I may not be the model of a modern hip millennial, but I’m a pretty far cry from a Luddite or a technophobe.

It may come as something of a surprise, then, that my favorite form of long-term communication is the hand-written letter.

I like receiving letters. I like the feel of them in my hand, the weight of their pages, light but still perceptible. I like seeing people’s handwriting, matching letterforms to syntax. I like learning my friends’ approaches to errors, how they react to an encroaching margin. I like being able to live with the anticipation and mystery of an unopened envelope — a letter can’t be answered on the day of its arrival, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t open it the minute you receive it.

I like sending letters. I like clearing out the time to write them, marking out an hour or so to just Do One Thing, without the convenient distraction of another browser tab. I like the expansive, meditative mood I get into when I’m writing them — tidbits of news will be long dated by the time a reply arrives, but zooming out a bit and summing up an overview has a bit more staying power. I like the physicality of a pen gliding across paper, of seeing an empty page fill up with flowing scrawls. I like knowing that if they get shoved inside a shoebox and tucked away in a cool dry place for fifty years, they’ll probably be perfectly readable, unlike a desktop hard drive.

I like the content letters get out of me. I don’t like leaving lots of empty space, so unlike an e-mail which is always only as long as it is, I dig a little deeper and tell stories that might otherwise fall by the wayside. From what I can tell, many of my correspondents do this as well, and these little tidbits, the small and almost accidental windows into their lives, are sources of profound delight.

Much of this is rank sentiment. There’s no reason I can’t write the same way in a Facebook message as I do with a pen on the page. (I could even set myself character minimums if I really needed the goading.) Facebook and tumblr provide many little windows, with built-in ways for expressing appreciation for them. Knowing someone’s handwriting doesn’t really tell you anything new about them.

So?

I am a creature of sentiment. I like many of the things I like without rhyme or reason. My goal is not to lead a life filled only with things defensible from first principles, to cut every trace of inefficiency or irrationality from what I do. I want to enjoy the ride, not streamline my journey to its end.

Letters aren’t for everything. I wouldn’t give up my ability to text my collaborators, to simultaneously chat with friends in Connecticut, Thailand, and Japan, to reblog trenchant commentary about the latest Marvel film — not for an infinite supply of postage stamps. Social media isn’t always and only a source of pure unblemished good, but I wouldn’t want to go back to the days where I had to rely on the postal system to hear about Ferguson. Letters aren’t for everything.

But the things they are for, they’re pretty good at. So if you can spare the time (and it’s certainly true not everyone can), maybe think about writing a letter to someone you love. It won’t heal all the broken places in the world, but it might just build a few islands of calm.

And if you’re a friend of mine: Can I have your address?

Not So Universal

If you spend much time listening to people talk about music, sooner or later you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear someone tout music (especially western concert music from, say, 1600 to 1945ish) as a “universal language” that can transcend temporal and cultural boundaries and speak to people with very different personal backgrounds. Now, to some degree this is obviously true. People who are not 17th-century Italian aristocrats can enjoy Monteverdi; Beethoven’s ninth symphony did not die with the last audience member at its premiere. 

But take a listen to something like Vincent Persichetti’s Parable IX for concert band. It’s an acerbic, uncompromising work full of jagged motifs and harsh edges. If music is a language, most people would say this is sheer gibberish.

And yet we’ve only gone a very small way outside of the concert music canon. Persichetti was trained thoroughly in classical composition, and Parable IX dates from 1972, within thirty years of such popular pieces as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and Copland’s third symphony (1946). If our goal is to plumb the depths of musical diversity, we’ve barely dipped our toes in, and we’re already running into incomprehensibility.

Seems like a pretty dismal prospect for universality, no?

At this point, some of you may be thinking to yourselves “well, of course not all music has universal appeal, only some of it does!”.

I think we need to go further. None of it does.

No one is born with an appreciation for Beethoven. No one comes out of the womb tapping their foot to Sondheim or Porter. These tastes have to be acquired.

If Beethoven’s fifth symphony seems to resonate with “everyone” today, it is only because we have never stopped teaching people to understand Beethoven. Even ignoring the (considerable) play time for his actual works, the underpinnings of his language are everywhere, from muzak to movie scores. Music works by setting up patterns that listeners recognize and then either fulfilling them or tweaking them in surprising ways. If you don’t have an intuitive understanding of the patterns, you won’t be able to make head or tail of the music that uses them. This is why the Persichetti from earlier is so nonsensical to so many people — He’s using patterns that are far enough outside the average listener’s experience that said average listener can’t tell when they’re being fulfilled and when they’re being violated — they can’t feel the forces of expectation and surprise that make music tick. Beethoven is universal only insofar as the patterns he uses in his music are.

(Lest anyone argue that prevalence of western musical patterns is due to some inherent superiority on the patterns’ behalf: These patterns were in vogue among the European elite at a time when they were colonizing as many other parts of the world as it could and systematically destabilizing and attempting to eradicate indigenous cultural traditions. This is … not a coincidence.)

That you have to know the patterns to understand the music, however, offers some hope. Recognizing these kinds of patterns is a matter of familiarity. You don’t have to know what a Perfect Authentic Cadence is to get the emotional impact of one; you don’t have to study theory and scores, you just have to listen. If you want to “get into” a new style of music, from modernist works for wind band to traditional Indian ragas and beyond, all you have to do is listen. Studying the theory may help if you have the background to make sense of it, but listening is the key. At first, things will sound like an undifferentiated wash (and possibly a pretty unpleasant one at that), but in time, with enough exposure, your brain will start to make sense of what’s coming at it — you’ll start to pick out islands of difference in the sea of sameness. You’ll start to understand what you’re hearing. It will start to mean things to you. (Whether this payoff is worth the amount of time you’ll have to spend with confused ears is something only you can answer.)

No style of music is universal, but the tools to understand it are available to all who can hear.