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Challenging the ears

Listeners often find the many different trends in new music difficult to absorb. The scientist, musician and physician Eckart Altenmüller has some advice.

14.03.2017
© Anne Van Aerschot - New Music

Germany. What on earth is that? Despite the many varieties of new music, they have one thing in common: they are hard on the listener. It can make some people’s hair stand on end, whilst others turn away in horror. But new music can definitely be enjoyable says Eckart Altenmüller, Head of the Department of Music Physiology and Musician’s Medicine at the University for Music, Theatre and Media in Hanover.

Eckart Altenmüller

Professor Altenmüller, you are not only an avid musician, researcher and university teacher, you are also a physician. How agreeable is new music?

New music is a challenge, but at the same time very agreeable. If, for instance, a patient perceives new music as positive, then its healing effects can be just as effective as music by Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. The decisive thing is familiarization. We need to be open to new music and listen to it more often. This suggests that far more new music should be played.

So listening to new music can be learned?

Definitely. Each listening activity, from the news on the radio to a composition by Pierre Boulez, is aural training at the same time. When we listen to new music, new traces of memory form in our brains. In time, these help us to gain a new orientation in the work. Whenever this happens, it gives our sensory system real pleasure. We experience deep satisfaction when we suddenly find our feet in the seeming chaos of a new music composition. Of course, we also have to be willing to venture into insecurity and to tolerate it.

Does new music ever intend to please?

There are certainly some composers who aim mainly to convey sensual pleasure. But basically, the main objective of new music is to call things into question, to redefine perceptual patterns and dismantle old ones, so that we can broaden our horizons of experience and in the final instance explain things better. 

„Musik im Kopf“: the horn player Sarah Willis meets Eckart Altenmüller for Deutsche Welle

 

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