THE READING ROOM: Craig Havighurt’s ‘Musicality for Modern Humans’

We often refers to certain pieces of music, usually popular songs or albums associated with memorable experiences (whether happy or sad) or significant swathes of time, as the soundtrack of our lives. Every now and then, a song comes on the radio and in that moment we’re transported to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes of that earlier time. When we go to a live music performance, though, do we experience such feelings as we listen to the music? Do we have certain expectations of the group or orchestra playing? Do we come to the music with preconceptions about the ways a song or movement should be played; that is, at least with popular song, do we expect the band to perform a song just the way we’re used to hearing it on the record, or are we open to the artist’s improvising on the song? In his richly detailed Musicality for Modern Humans: How to Listen Like an Artist (The Sager Group), Craig Havighurst, Editorial Director at WMOT 89.5 FM in Nashville and host of a weekly interview show The String, asks readers about their current listening habits. He then warmly invites them to consider “listening like an artist,” offering an array of tools help them “listen for” certain moments that enrich the experience of the music.

Havighurst sets the scene for his reflections in his opening pages: “In this noisy, visual, and ultra-stimulated twenty-first century, how often do you listen to music actively and exclusively? . . . What was the last concert you saw? What was the last show you saw by an artist you only knew a little bit about, and how was that experience? Generally, how hungry are you to hear new ideas, especially from genres you don’t intimately know? Do you let algorithms decide what’s on your playlist, or do you seek your own path, building relationships with musicians from beyond the comfort zones of yourself and your social group? How ready are you to pause the world and truly be with and inside a cathedral of human-dreamed, hand-made sound?”