January 28, 2013 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Adam Gopnik’s “Music to Your Ears.” What a cabinet of wonders it is: plasma rocket engines, Elvis Presley’s private jet, 3-D sound, nonfigurative Greek vases, Antiochian Orthodox, Appalachian snake handlers, ancient Arabic freestyle rap, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Cyclops, XTC wave, BACCH filter, Victrola recording, St. Catherine Street, McGill faculty club, Darwin, auditory Chimera, Blue Öyster Cult, Nashville harmonics, Yamaha Disklavier, Kate Smith tremelo, psycho-acoustics, Gershwin, MP3s, Bell Labs, Stereo Purifier, Jambox, on and on – all strung on a personal narrative of meetings, interviews and lunches that Gopnik has with various “sound scholars” in New York and Montreal. It’s a terrific piece and it contains several inspired quasi-surreal sentences (e.g., “The poignant C-major seventh saves your life when your emotions are already pitched somewhere around a hard-edged, unresolved G-7”). Gopnik’s most brilliant move is his use of the rippling, sparkling, serene playing of the great jazz pianist Ellis Larkins as a metaphor for music’s meaning-making (“The answer to Bregman’s question ‘Why do we like music?’ isn’t this thing or that thing but many things at once pressing down hard, and then lightly, on our minds, as Ellis Larkins presses on the keyboard”). For a wonderful profile of Larkins, see Whitney Balliett’s “Einfühlung” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978; included in Balliett’s 1983 collection Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats).