Opinion | Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven. - The New York Times

Guest Essay

By Jonathan Biss

Mr. Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival

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.

You may prefer literature or painting as art forms, but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not “about” anything. It stirs the emotions despite — or maybe because of — its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way. A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music.

That phrase — “the magic of music” — is used with some frequency by the marketing departments of musical organizations. But often, their efforts to support that music reflect different priorities. In recent years, I’ve played many solo recitals in which images of my hands were projected on a giant screen overhead and have been asked to record video of myself playing in promotion of a concert, but for no more than 30 seconds. Some orchestras have encouraged audiences to live-tweet performances. If you watch a concert on a livestream, you are often invited to chat with other viewers during the performance. Engagement first; listening second.

Meanwhile, multidisciplinary and multimedia projects are increasingly in vogue. The message from programmers is clear: Audiences supposedly don’t want to be submerged in the music. They are the customers, and the customer is always right.

This is not a black-and-white issue. An art form should be in a constant state of evolution, and some of those mixed-media projects are stimulating and excellent. But if we lose our capacity to focus deeply on music, we lose one of the greatest gifts we are granted as human beings. If the people promoting classical music reduce this to a question of supply and demand, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less we are able to pay attention, the less we are asked to pay attention, which only degrades our attention further.

While marketing departments talk about magic, classical music organizations frequently strive to present themselves as relevant. This is understandable. The alternative to relevance is irrelevance; no one wants to be irrelevant. And given that classical music has so often effectively excluded people based on their race, gender or socioeconomic status, aiming to be accessible to, and truly engaged with, one’s community is not just laudable but essential.

But I would urge every person involved in the music world to think about what it means to be relevant. Is it reflexively changing with the times by driving us deeper into using devices, which study after study tells us are making us lonelier and more anxious, less happy and fulfilled? Or will relevance come from leaning into the most powerful thing music can offer: total absorption into a world of possibility and wonder and spirituality and play?

I strongly suspect that if we nurture our capacity to concentrate absolutely on music, it will have ripple effects in other areas of our lives. On days when I have practiced well, with ears wide open and my full attention on the music I am playing, I find myself more able to focus in other ways, too: reading without growing distracted, or being present in the lives of my family and friends. But musical immersion is its own reward.

The slow movement of Beethoven’s Op. 127 is nominally a set of variations. The word “variations,” however, is unequal to the task of conveying the transformations undergone by the theme, a hymn reflecting a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom and patience. The theme is not embellished in these variations; it is revealed. Successively, we hear its ardor, its mischief, its radiance, its pain, its mystery — all qualities that initially lay beneath its surface of sublime simplicity. By the movement’s end, it has evolved into something beyond music. It is pure spirit.

As I listened to this astonishing music in the Marlboro dining hall, I never opened my eyes. This was an instinct. I sensed an opportunity to be connected to something profound and beautiful and in no way ordinary, and I did not want to let my other senses intrude on the experience. In our splintered, combustible world, this immersion is the path of most resistance, and a gift beyond words.

Jonathan Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival

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