wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: June 16, 2008, 8:33 pm

It’s really amazing to watch those who listen to mechanical music on the subway cars; to listen to the rhythmic peeping ambient “outer” aura of their piped music along with the larger, incessant pure cascading steel propulsion as the city is lofted past my subway car, the electric chariot. When, at a stop, the car doors open, an occasional musician is active on the train platform, slashing guitar strings or pipa,or italian fiddle with a languid blues. The air surges with other trains, pulling away at the musician’s insistent broadcast… Still, those listening to their own identity-music carry right on, fixed to their machine. Each station has it’s own sound of alacrity and potent animation. Each lit attention firm and flexing on the music of intentionality, be it book, be it grading school papers, be it keeping the baby-bottle from rolling to the floor. Instant by instant, to see this music and it’s diversity of common passions, of focus and escape…. is all the music I can bear aboard the #1 up to the gates at Morningside Heights and the rows of shade-trees.. the rustle and echoes of colloquy. Should it not, after all be called music when there is this freshness of listening, to patterned inter-accidental? What will I say to my class in the next moments? What music will they be thinking of instead of the texts on assignment? What music will they lodge in memory and reconsider in another several years? Will their wandering appetites ricochet to the thought of John Cage’s critical openness, the alliterations of Samuel Beckett, the wild cloudfog clawhand trees of Han Shan, or the “understanding is a choice and interpretation is a mode of the will” of Learned Hand? How can anyone remember anything, including the signifiers of chance and music? Ciao, T

Comment from dc
Date: June 16, 2008, 8:38 pm

reggae, mostly reggae. a show i download called reggae bloodlines. long story short, can’t add or change the selection! but i still love it!

Comment from Hermit
Date: June 16, 2008, 10:20 pm

I hardly ever ride the train - luckily I can usually walk where I need to. But recently I did purchase a small pocket radio with an earphone jack, because some evenings it’s too beautiful to stay inside just to listen to Evening Music.

Comment from Anthony Clune
Date: June 16, 2008, 10:28 pm

That tonal interval would be a major third, yes?

” for those who think young.”

I occasional perforce a subway fluxus piece by whistling that interval as the train doors close… Then continue that musical interval into first popular song that pops into my head… or sometimes just making something up…

Please stand clear of the closing doors, **

Comment from Anthony Clune
Date: June 16, 2008, 10:29 pm

err, your website stripped out some text I typed in brackets

PEP-SI, for those who think young.

and

Please stand clear of the closing doors BEE-BOOP

Comment from Mary
Date: June 16, 2008, 10:29 pm

Hi! I’m a heavy #1 train rider. I’m always careful about being too tuned out but when I do listen to music, it’s usually musicals and/or music to practice for a show. And music to drown out the person who is sharing their music coming out of their ears just a little too loud. Tried classical once, but isn’t really rewarding because of the loud then quiet parts. With the trian noise, you have keep turning it up and down too much (because I don’t use noice canceling earphones). In public, don’t like to be too tuned out. Or sometimes I’ll just listen to the orchestration of everyone else’s muffled tunes coming through, watching them enjoying themselves and smiling (that is, if I’m in the mood).

Comment from sunnygravely
Date: June 16, 2008, 10:33 pm

One of the sounds I love BEST on the trains are probably all of the eclectic musicians that ride the rails for coins and recognition. I have seen a mixture of outstanding vocalist and instrumentalist to plain obtrusive and annoying cat songs with “electric boogie” moves. However, the landscape of the subway system would be so dry and monotanous without these colorful performers. Has anyone seen this young brother that rides the train with baggy jeans and a bandana on his head, but plays these beautiful classical songs with a violin? I have to give up money everytime I see him because he visually looks like the opposite of the music he represents and the enormous talent and skill he posesses. But, I’ll admit I’m a sucker for people that not only DO NOT follow the norms, but can also blow the “judging a book by it’s cover” thing out the window. Sometimes, I pretend to listen to earphones so that “crazy” people won’t talk to me, but secretly I’m listening to everything around me…Did I ever answer the question? I love any music and every music that moves me.

Comment from Pat Winter
Date: June 16, 2008, 11:09 pm

Terrance,

Hope you hang around for a few inutes to get this timely little bit of synchronicity. How strangely appropriate that you played the piece of the the singing Surgeon. am sitting on this Ozark mountainside writing 1865, a novel about the last desperate year of the Civil War. right in the middle of a scene in a battlefield hospital tent where the patient and surgeon are singing the old hymn “There is a fountain filled with blood…” when Grant brings in a couple of litle brown jugs for everybody to take a sip… Patient is of course stonned on morphine and the surgeon draws a map in uncommon ink on his chest to indicate to Grant where he can find the trenches out to the men still alive between the lines… The Battle of Cold Harbor… what a mess…

But how strangely wonderful that you played that piece…

I got the WNYC habit when I lived on Positively 4th Street near Ave A for 16 years…

God bless you and the music and the station…you belong to the world you know…

–Patricia

Comment from Linda Lanier-Keosaia
Date: June 17, 2008, 7:34 pm

I am an organist and we organists all know a piece by a Frenchman, Jean Alain, which uses the rhythm of his commuter train for the theme of haunting, driving, exciting piece, called Litanies. I dare you to play it on Evening Music!

Comment from Richard Mitnick
Date: June 18, 2008, 3:15 pm

#8 Pat Winter gets it.

With audio streaming at decent bit rates and stereo, serious music on PubRadio is now in a global competition for ears and dollars.

WNYC gets it, and has chosen a brave path, away from the beautifully boring, and into the sometimes inscrutable but interesting. It’s good. We learn something, and it does not sound like Classical 24 or C.P.R.N.

Keep it up. Maybe we can win back some of the dollars that New Yorkers are sending to KCRW, Los, Angeles, whose second largest market is New York City.

>>RSM

Comment from jim
Date: June 18, 2008, 7:53 pm

yes, buy an ipod. i resisted for a very, very long time, but it definitely made riding the subway much better, and not by making it antisceptic or putting me in my own world, as much as it added an interesting emotional dimension.

btw, the show is great. i used to fall over myself to switch away from wnyc-fm at 7pm- speaking as a donor for many years- but i really, really enjoy it now. if you can just get tom scharpling to do a show after evening music, my life would be complete.

Comment from Mark
Date: June 19, 2008, 10:36 am

Speaking of doors closing and major thirds…Anyone ever hear in the whining sound of an accelerating train three tones that call to mind “Somewhere” from West Side Story? Listen next time..There’s…a…place…

Comment from Christine
Date: June 19, 2008, 2:19 pm

Anything from the Brian Eno “Ambient Sound” series. The repetitive nature of the “looping” (for lack of a better word) process sometimes echoes the repetitive patterns and rhythms of the noise from the car as it travels along the tracks. Eno’s music from that era also provides a most welcome contrast to the frenetic pace and often times unbearable clatter of the subway environment.

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: June 19, 2008, 8:18 pm

From a modernist perspective, as emotionally contorted and hyper-ardent as Scriabin’s delightful pieces are, it is very difficult to take seriously the conviction that such emotional intensity could mark a person with a lasting transformation, particularly a high consolation, a mystic gateway. Even with several relistenings to the Scriabin Fantasy, it is puzzling that others tried to invest themselves in feeling the work was transforming. What a stunning degree of appetite! What sensory extremity coupled with a manic emotional zeal!

Today, we have the somewhat casual locution, of course, that a performance “moves” us; perhaps referring to the fiction that our character is substantially altered from one state into an after-state by musical excitement or by other artistic performance. I wonder what this signifes within us.

On the subway… perhaps Scriabin and the thrash-disjunctive rattlebox? …and at most train stops, the road not taken. Even a ragtime jitter… a dance of showing promenade for the dignity of human bodily grace and empathetic beauty…. Is there a lucid remainder, an enduring constructive transform? Ciao, T

Comment from tony t.
Date: June 19, 2008, 10:20 pm

Yesterday on your show, you announced ‘This is the music of kyle gann, written in 1997′…… Then you continued to talk over (and im not exagerrating) the ENTIRE clip. What was the point of this? Why announce a piece that you talk over? This could be a spotlight on Loppate’s Please Explain!

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: June 20, 2008, 8:36 am

I’m also wondering about the Mozart Caritas Chorale which was so rightly played twice. We listen in perhaps two conflicting ways: (1) listening in absorption, or (2) listening in dispassion for discernment. This opens a vista on our skills and how we choose what to value.

By enabled receptiveness, magnified sensitivity, we get CAPTURED into a fascination-state. We are then experientially a mind circling in a special appetite. Our focus cycles to cause us to feel euphoria, an intoxicated “astound”, BONDED to emotional reception of some form of beauty. But what is the worth of this beauty, and of it’s reception?

The sequence of music effectively funnels our sensations and also our expectations, so that euphoria (perhaps synthetic euphoria?) is reliable for us. This has consequences. We thirst for this euphoria, just exactly as we do for nourishment of all kinds. Our body, our feelings and desires, our imagination all then insist on having this intoxicant. We build a strong desire, a desire-habit for music that leads us into and keeps us cycling at this euphoria. And we take the experience as a constructive addiction. A few moments after the music stops the experience evanesces as a mere ephemeron.

But what about “second listening”? What about the alternative way of listening, in which we carefully watch our passion itself; SEE what is happening to us. Of equal importance, we can skillfully attend to HOW the music’s toolbox is stimulating us, what makes it tick: why this timbre, why this meter, why this harmonic and tonal context, why this monody / polyphony. Is one music more apt for our needs than is some other music? This means that we can observe the music as an instrument of stimulus. We can also understand the import of the choice we make between stimuli. We can also discern the effects on us and ultimately the consequences of those effects. We see the cause AND we see the effects. A third dimension is also then apparent: in that observation mode, our skill can also examine the music as a vessel of communication, as a meaning-object. The Mozart is a monument of meaning: interhuman tenderness, expressive commonality that is sensitive to what each musician and listener yearns for. And as we apprehend this we can also look at how our own mind is responding beyond the purely aural sensation of the music, to the emotions of want, and to meaning-components themselves: what is the root of our want?

Why this response? Why discern? Why feel that the euphoria, standing alone, isn’t fully complete? As this inquiry becomes active, the mind moves from being just a tourist (making very strong self-memories for later nostalgia), into being a genuine student (lastingly applying memory so there is a new stream of future discoveries that can have synthesis, deeper and more comprehensive insights. The beginning of the work –beyond distraction and escape– of focused imagination). Evening music is the “raw stuff”, very select, from which this practice is available to everyone. It’s more than a study… it’s a bridgeway and universal key to the impounding locks that have sealed our old habits and therefore closed off our old viewpoint. Should this matter? Ah, well. Into your perhaps willing hands… Caritas. Ciao, T

Comment from A.Girl fr. Cleveland
Date: June 22, 2008, 1:10 am

Mark was right on. The Bernstein Estate should be collecting residules!

As for you Terrance. Don’t do it! Don’t get an IPOD. You are a musician. Find the music in everyday life. Listen to your inner voice; your inner rhythms. Listen to the musicians in the subway and wonder about their lives. Listen to nothing. Listen to everything. And another thing. Since you listen to so much music, maybe you could consider reading something on the subway instead: ).

There! My 2 cents.

Comment from Dagmar Riedel
Date: June 23, 2008, 1:29 pm

I am with the girl from cleveland:
Had Walker Evans ever thought of photographing people in the subway to make “many are called”, if he had been listening to his preferred music whenever riding the trains?

Comment from Amber
Date: June 23, 2008, 9:37 pm

Yes to #12, Mark! I always wondered if anyone else heard West Side Story on the platform.

Comment from perri
Date: July 15, 2008, 1:20 pm

If I’m reading the it’s almost always classical music or that lounge-style jazz of the mid 50’s to early 60s.