Finalist: Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times

On a sunny day just after the summer solstice in Perugia, Italy, and two months before his death in 1992, John Cage was seated in the medieval city hall explaining to an indignant woman how to listen to his chance-derived music, which made absolutely no sense to her. I happened to be with him, leafing through the Corriere dell’Umbria looking for a report about the Cage festival and conference in the Umbrian capital.

The composer borrowed the newspaper and held the front page up on the table, as though it were a curtain. He then placed objects, one by one, behind the sheet. For each — an assistant’s notepad, his hotel keys, his Bulova skeleton watch, his glasses, my fountain pen — Cage ceremoniously lifted the paper for a few seconds, then lowered it again.

Think of every sound being like that, he explained. If you don’t know what to expect, you see everything as if never before, and with new eyes. Everything is interesting.

“Mamma mia!” the woman exclaimed. Cage laughed his contagious laugh, and she delightedly hugged him.

During our many weeks of lockdown, there had been much comment about the world becoming a kind of Cage stage, a planet in pandemic dramatically quieted. We newly marveled at birdsong we never heard before outside our windows. This was said to be just the exercise in awareness that Cage had intended in his seminal silent piece, “4'33",” in which a performer makes no sound for that prescribed time, directing the audience’s attention to the environment instead.

But the imposed silence of our pandemic proved not always welcome. Neighbors became newly annoying, children demanding. During the peak of COVID-19 cases in New York City, friends told me of the terrible sensation of ambulance sirens breaking the eerie quiet of the streets every few minutes.

Even as the situation has vastly improved in Manhattan, people still complain of not sleeping. In his recent “A Primer for Forgetting,” Lewis Hyde described insomnia as “the too-much-memory disease.”

Then came the overpowering shock of the eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence the Rev. Al Sharpton directed mourners to observe at the funeral of George Floyd. Here, it was a reflection on the horrifying time Floyd was held to the ground and killed by Minneapolis police.

Is this, too, music? Every sound heard during that silence at the funeral and at every other eight-minute, 46-second memorial elsewhere became the notes of a requiem. Cage’s revelation is that there is no such thing as silence. Every sound is a living thing, a reminder of life being lived. And listening must always be in the ear of the beholder.

All in all, this has been an exceedingly strange time for music. Cage is also remembered for famously saying that nothing is accomplished by writing, performing or listening to a piece of music, and consequently our ears are in very good shape. Well, maybe they are, but during lockdown and now during the uncertain reopening of the country, music we know and love, along with once-loved music rediscovered, has been served up as comfort food, as a source to energize us, numb us, enlighten us, entertain us.

Bach, in particular, provided an incomparable source of refuge. In Brian Lauritzen’s “At Home” series on KUSC-FM, John Adams — isolated in his secluded Sonoma County composer’s hut writing an opera based on Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” — drew listeners to the sublime surety of Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson’s bestselling Bach recording. Meanwhile, for his “How to Think Like Bach” program, pianist Jeremy Denk invited neuroscientist Daniel Levitin to discuss how Bach’s ingenious resolution of dissonance might be something that can help the brain build neural bridges toward the optimism we desperately need to get through the day.

During the period of protest that followed, comfort became controversial. Dissonance was hailed as what we needed to understand what it takes for the oppressed to get through every day. Remembering and forgetting have gotten confused, suggesting two seemingly extreme ways of listening.

In forgetting, we get new ideas and, thus, new beginnings. In remembering, the path is through patterning. We celebrate either chaos or order, narrative or non-narrative, compelling emotion or illuminating abstraction, familiarity or novelty. We are given the choice of either embracing the proven past or, to quote the rest of the title of Hyde’s capriciously edifying new book, “Getting Past the Past.”

The great lesson of this huge cultural lesion in our midst is that we have no idea of what a “new normal” actually means. Each passing day offers surprises, new thoughts, fleeting revelations. Music plays a role in this. We continue to listen. And we take cues from what we hear, sometimes from discovery of something new, sometimes from hearing the familiar filtered through newly unfamiliar states of mind. We listen to confirm our moods and to change our moods.

What has changed most radically since the coronavirus outbreak, though, is where and with whom and under what circumstances we listen. Listening and making music have become much more private. The communal experience of making and receiving music has been lost.

It may be a year from Monday before concert life as we know it can resume, and if we turn to Cage’s book “A Year From Monday,” he offers his answer to the question: What shall I do to enjoy music?

“There’re many ways to help you. I’d give you a lift, for instance, if you were going in my direction, but the last thing I’d do would be to tell you how to use your own aesthetic facilities.”

With so little hope for live music on any reasonable scale to return for months, this seems a time to explore a number of individual works — from the Middle Ages to this muddled age, famous and obscure, from varied composers in equally varied genres. This series aims to suggest ways to listen, to offer reasons to listen or simply to open ears to whatever the sonic cat might drag in.

The largest body of music, culturally and historically, is classical. It’s a meaningless genre heading that can include a Bach meditation on death (the cantata “Es ist genug”) or Pauline Oliveros’ deep sonic thoughts with her accordion (“The Well & the Gentle”). It may reflect the African American experience through the omnivorous ears of Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio (“Sinfonia”) or George Lewis’ collaboration with iconic figures of jazz (“Shadowgraph, 5"). Music can be intended to glorify God sensually with four male voices in an incense-filled Gothic cathedral (Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame”) or ecstatically on a stage large enough to hold a 1,000-strong chorus and orchestra (Mahler’s Symphony No. 8). Music can be a melding of East and West (Toru Takemitsu’s “November Step”) or a place imagined free from imposed patriarchy (Olga Neuwirth’s “Masaot/Clocks Without Hand”) or an extreme fusion of Latin, Middle Eastern and whatnot influences (Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ayre”).

The real challenge for listeners is to overcome the worry of how much you know. Music is in one sense overrated as a universal language, given the requirements necessary for understanding its specific grammar, syntax and cultural context. There is ever the fascination with knowing how a piece of music — or anything — is made, be it the arithmetic additive rhythms in Philip Glass’ music or the chance procedures in Cage. Think of how radically dissimilar is the mindset required for hip hop and Gagaku, the ancient Japanese court music.

For all his liberation of the ear, Cage was an inveterate storyteller who often explained one of his insurgently non-narrative pieces with a memorable story. That is to say, every piece worth hearing has a story and doesn’t need one. Listening can be both following and forgetting, understanding and welcoming misunderstanding, overpowering the emotions and discounting them — often and in the best pieces, all at the same time. The evolution of what we call classical music through the millennia incorporates much of what it is like to live the life we do.

A year from Monday is a long time. I invite you to join me on a wild ride through a quirky selection of pieces, each of which, I like to think, has the promise to make the world feel a little fuller.

Travelogue DVDs are the favored entertainment in my dentist’s office during teeth cleaning. Once, as I was distracting myself by following a helicopter tour over the historic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims, France, the buzz of the polishing device triggered a vividly ringing performance, inside my head, of the opening of Guillaume de Machaut’s “Messe de Notre Dame,” which he wrote for this great Gothic space.

The mass features four male voices in open harmonies capable of amplifying mystery in the cathedral’s magnificent open spaces, a sound once heard and likely never forgotten. Swirling melodies liquefy the architecture. Incense-worthy harmonies imprison the senses. A mass of Marian devotion, Machaut’s “Messe” has strains of an amorous love letter to the Virgin Mary, as irresistible as it is shocking.

This is a one-of-a-kind mass, written probably around 1360, only a few years after the Black Death, when bubonic plague reduced the population of Reims by a quarter to a third, as it did most of Europe. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France had been raging for more than two decades. Yet there was, in this so-called calamitous century, beauty and innovation that has lasted, with unvarnished relevance, for hundreds of years more. In many ways, Machaut serves as the starting point for the modern idea of music.

Music was around, of course, before Machaut. The curtain goes up in Richard Taruskin’s monumental, five-volume Oxford History of Western Music with 8th century chant. In “A Million Years of Music,” Gary Tomlinson makes the case for patterning behaviors in our hominin ancestors 800,000 years ago being precedent for “modern musicking.” And the dinosaurs beat us to that 200 million years earlier, at least in “Jurassic Park.”

But it is only in the two centuries before Machaut that we can begin assigning modern sounds to old music and the personality of two composers who continue to entrance modern ears. Hildegard von Bingen’s 12th century chants have proved marvelous enough to make the mystical abbess cult-worthy. Pérotin’s rhythmically striking chants influenced Steve Reich’s early minimalism. During these two centuries, polyphony slowly arose to glorify sacred spaces. Troubadours and minnesingers created a new popular musical culture, as did instrumental dance music.

Yet Von Bingen or Pérotin remain historical curiosities. It is with Machaut that the looking-back stops. You don’t need to be told how to listen to the “Messe de Notre Dame.” In it, Machaut seems to have almost had his finger on our pulse.

There is a flowing character in which solemn melody blossoms almost like the blues (and, yes, there are blues, as well as folk and jazz Machaut covers, to say nothing of heavier metal). His modal harmonies are ones we hear all the time. When Beethoven used the Lydian mode in his Opus 132 string quartet, the previous work in our How to Listen series, he was specifically evoking an all-but-forgotten past. But once modal music became newly adopted by Debussy, Bartók and other 20th century composers, it never left us.

Most of all, though Machaut’s “Notre Dame” represents the first great example of one of the most familiar and significant genres of Western music. The mass, as a musical composition, has long transcended specific liturgical intent. This central rite of the Catholic Church has remarkably wound up having a central place in the development of Western music, adaptable to any and all musical styles and occasions. It serves spiritual practices and perspectives far removed from Roman Catholicism. There is simply no way to think about classical music without Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” Janácek’s “Glagolitic Mass,” Stravinsky’s Mass, Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” to say nothing of the eternally timely requiem masses by Mozart, Berlioz, Brahms, Verdi, Faure and Ligeti.

Machaut’s is the first mass by a single composer. It is also the first to fully incorporate styles of other genres, such as motet and song yet retain an overriding unity and personality. Machaut’s great achievement is to humanize the mass to such an extent that its specific sections of Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and Agnus Dei come to be heard as universalized glorification of goodness, as pleas for peace and goodwill for all.

The means of doing this for Machaut were hardly of his own devising. For all the awfulness of his time, the 14th century gave us the first institutionalized avant-garde in music. Thanks to the Ars Nova, once forbidden and still disapproved of dissonances added expression in melodies. Rhythms gained mathematical complexity, as theorists demonstrated ways of creating contrapuntal structures based on square roots and cubing numbers. Difficult to discern repeated rhythmic patterns, part of a process called isorhythms, underscored freer flowing melodies, full of hiccuping syncopation (called hocket).

In Machaut’s Kyrie, where there is little text, rigorous formalism is the guiding principle. In the Gloria and Credo, much Latin must be set, and here the style changes to dramatic musical description peppered with moments of stunning gravity, such as when everything stops for grounding on the words Jesu Christe. The Sanctus ends with a rapt, unstoppably knock-em-dead Amen, beginning the challenge for composers to outdo one another with their Amens. The minutiae in Machaut’s “Notre Dame” are more plentiful for most ears, just as the decorative details in Notre Dame’s Gothic design are for eyes of a visitor to Reims.

For me, seeing this magnificent cathedral, where kings had their coronations, from a dentist chair gave it a wholly unexpected novel perspective. But then every time the “Messe de Notre Dame” comes upon us, the perspective changes. Performance styles vary greatly. Most of the historically minded do it with just four singers, but some go for a chorus, and some add instruments.

Imaginative musicians do whatever strikes them. You can find arrangements of the mass for viola and accordion. The Kronos Quartet scatters a string quartet arrangement of Machaut’s Kyrie throughout its 1997 “Early Music” album. Jeremy Denk begins his latest piano recording with Machaut. Roland Hayes brought the same resounding brilliance to Machaut that he did to African American spirituals. Don’t miss the “sick black metal” Machaut of a group called Sühnopfer.

Messe de Notre Dame ends with what should be the appropriate inevitability of its final section, “Ita Missa Est” (Go, the Mass Is Ended). It lasts less than a minute and is utterly, dancer-ly joyous. No solemn processional this, but a swift kick in the pants to get out into the world and live. Machaut, the latest musicological research tells us, meant his mass as memorial for himself. What a way to go.

Starting points

There have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 recordings of “Messe de Notre Dame,” beginning with excerpts made 1935, endearingly sung as though perfumed Poulenc.

The Hilliard Ensemble gave us a marvelously clean and pure 1987 performance that has the flavor of modern music.

The Orlando Consort recording from 2008, “Scattered Rhythms,” features the mass made deliciously ripe and plumy and placed with gorgeous contemporary works by Tarik O’Regan and Gavin Bryars.

The Belgian ensemble Graindelavoix lives up to its name in a recent revolutionary version, adding aggressive vocal grain and wild ornamentation that turns “Messe de Notre Dame” into a kind of transgressive folk music, which, for all we know, may be just what the 14th century Reims avant-garde was all about.

“Ich habe genug,” Bach’s Cantata No. 82, is commonly rendered in English as “I am content.” At the cantata’s center is a lullaby of consoling sweetness, generosity of spirit and somnolent blessedness, its melody beyond compare.

These last four months Bach has been classical music’s No. 1 comfort-giver, music bestowing a sourdough for the soul. But who, in their right mind, is currently content? Who’s not sleeping either too much or too little, with nights spent if not in escape then in angst?

The literal translation is “I have enough.” Contentment, on the other hand, presupposes happiness. Bach has something more subversive in mind: not content but shocking content. His cantata provides a manual for how to die sublimely, mapping the road to paradise. And on the surface, this is seemingly the last thing anybody wants to hear during terrifying circumstances that permit no such thing.

I tried an experiment. For a couple of days, the cantata was the last music I listened to before going to bed and the first I turned to in the morning. It neither alleviated nighttime apprehension nor proved effective daytime mood enhancer. I was no more content, but the funny thing was that I greatly looked forward to those times of listening anyway. BWV 82, to use the conventional numbering system we use for Bach, didn’t become one of the best loved of Bach’s some 200 extant cantatas for no reason.

Bach’s cantatas were an unimaginable achievement. He is believed to have composed at least 300 (a third or more have been lost). At age 38, put in charge of music for the four principal Lutheran churches of Leipzig, Germany, in 1723, Bach was required to provide 59 cantatas a year, one for each week’s Sunday service plus some for holidays. Most of the cantatas employed choruses, a solo singer or two and an instrumental ensemble in which members might also have virtuoso solo parts, and that also meant frantic rehearsal schedules.

Though not required to write all of them, Bach obsessively tried to in the first years. The cantatas became for the composer an almanac of emotional responses to his time and place, the seasons of the year, the joys and sorrows of 18th century Leipzig life. They were profound meditations on the meaning of it all, sermons in sound disguised as liturgy, but also actual liturgy.

The cantata (which merely means singing) was, itself, a vague genre. Though mainly sacred, cantatas could be secular as well, intended for weddings and other celebrations, funerals or even, as Bach delightfully demonstrated, the coffeehouse. They typically contained arias for one or two singers, a chorus, and a small ensemble with solos for virtuoso players. They could be starchily formal or free-flowing, operatic or pietistic, shameless or scolding. For Bach’s sacred ones, the liturgical calendar determined the hymns and the text. Yet to the annoyance of the church fathers, Bach’s music was often the prime attraction for services that began at 7 a.m. and could wear on for four hours. Leipzig’s socialite congregants were known to come late and leave early, surer to show for Bach than for the sermon.

BWV 82 was written in 1727 for the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, which fell on Feb. 2. It is for a solo singer and has no need for chorus or hymn tune. Its anonymous libretto focuses on Simeon, who, after seeing the infant Jesus at the temple, has no more need for earthly life.

In his brilliant Bach study, “Music in the Castle of Heaven,” the conductor John Eliot Gardiner describes the underlying theology as viewing the world as “a hospital peopled by sick souls whose sins fester like suppurating boils and yellow excrement.” But in BWV 82, Bach radically allows us to all aspire to being angels. Death is not transformation, it is mission accomplished, a good night’s sleep and the cheery trip home to report the good news of salvation.

Angels, we’re not, yet for 25 minutes we get to feel like we are. Bach is respectful and alert to his nothing-special anonymous text. The sounds of words are spun into luxurious melodies, their intent given instances of operatic flair. But his far more meaningful accomplishment is to transcend the text altogether.

The form of the cantata is straightforward. A singer — Bach made versions for soprano, mezzo-soprano and bass-baritone — has three arias, connected by two short narrative recitatives. A small string ensemble acts as a security blanket, providing the singer soft comfort.

A solo oboe (or flute in the soprano version) spins acrobatic melodies in sophisticated counterpoint to the vocal line. Over the gently lapping strings, the opening aria begins with the oboe or flute introducing the five-note melodic phrase that will carry the words “Ich habe genug.” It repeats the phrase, extending the initial three measures into 26 with an elaborate, lavishly flowing tail, like an early 18th century anticipation of one of John Coltrane’s arrestingly lyric soprano saxophone extensions. The oboe continues over the voice, not in dialogue but in dance.

Bach is not telling us something in music. He is not showing us anything. He is not even, however much it might seem so, unveiling the emotions laden in the text. He is taking us somewhere.

The supposed task of the lullaby aria “Schlummert ein” (Slumber now) was to represent death as sleep. Instead, Bach produces a musical miracle. Lest he lull us into sleep, Bach produces a state of awe. Sleep, then, become not death but a fleeting vision of death from which we awake refreshed. That is why the short, joyful final aria can be outrageously alive.

“Ich habe genug” came just after Bach had had enough of cantatas and of death, which had been his constant companion. His parents died when he was a boy. His first wife died young. He endured the deaths of six of his 20 children, including that of a son six months before writing this cantata. By this point Bach had moved on from the Herculean task of nonstop cantata making, turning them out on an occasional basis. BWV 82 was personal, and Bach produced a total of six versions of it, the last in 1748, two years before his own death.

Six months before 9/11, the irreplaceable mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sang the cantata in a staged production by Peter Sellars at Lincoln Center in New York. Over the previous two years, she had nursed her dying sister and undergone touch-and-go cancer treatment. Sellars’ startling staging was that of a dying patient in a hospital; it ended with Hunt Lieberson pulling out her life support. There was not an ounce of contentment in the way Hunt Lieberson sang the words “Ich habe genug.” In her own struggle with a cancer growing out of control in her body, she conveyed the ethereal weight of enough-ness from the deepest part of her being.

To the universal question of what it means to have enough when we live in a world that dangerously and self-destructively is asking for ever more, Bach is the answer. When the Sellars production toured Amsterdam in 2005, “Ich habe genug” became a kind of farewell for one of the greatest singers the U.S. has produced. Hunt Lieberson died of cancer the following year.

Starting points

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson recorded Bach’s Cantata No. 82 in 2002 with Nonesuch Records. It belongs in every collection. But that is not to say that there is any one way to perform “Ich habe genug.”

Masaaki Suzuki offers a way to hear the cantata in a historically informed manner. His eloquent, restrained approach with soprano and bass versions is part of his luminous complete set of Bach cantatas. Check out BIS Records and Bach-Cantatas.com.

John Eliot Gardiner supplies exhilarating lyricism in a performance you can find on YouTube.

Hans Hotter has a 1950 recording on YouTube that can’t be beat for old-school voice-of-God, and Thomas Quasthoff, also on YouTube, gives a soul-searching modern equivalent.

The last wonted Walt Disney Concert Hall program this year, barring a miracle COVID-19 cure, was on March 10. The pandemic had just begun to divide people from one another, and attendance was said to be sparse enough for de facto social distancing by the audience. The final piece on the recital program by the feisty young pianist Conrad Tao happened to be “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”

Frederic Rzewski’s hourlong set of 36 variations on a Chilean protest song is widely regarded a modern classic. Written by an expatriate American composer and pianist living in Belgium, it was given its premiered by Ursula Oppens in 1976, boldly during the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Boldly, because “People United” examines in every imaginable manner the virtues of an anthem of the Chilean left coalition, Unidad Popular, headed by the first democratically elected Marxist in Latin America, Salvador Allende.

Three years before the premiere, Allende, who had been a target of the Nixon administration, was overthrown in a coup. Rzewski’s score was, to say the least, politically loaded, this seemingly secreted blueprint for revolution presented two miles from FBI headquarters. An hour spent in such music’s presence, witnessing a pianist’s epic struggle at the jaw-dropping virtuosity of these variations, absorbing the sheer vastness of Rzewski’s imaginative and emotional range, is a soul-stirring event, and hence a danger.

But the real power of “People United” is not the song, arresting ear-worm that it contains, but its logic. A listener knowing neither the song nor its context is faced with a classic series of variations on a theme, realized through an abstract classical construction. Come across it inadvertently for the first time on the radio, and you will be faced with a work of enormous diversity, with elements from old music and new, popular and experimental, unpredictably put together with compelling internal musical integrity. Analyze it, and you find an amazing jigsaw framework on which it rests. Not only does “People United” share qualities with the other two great sets of piano variations — Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” — it is beginning to take its rightful place next to them, as Igor Levit’s award winning recording of all three released in 2015 amply demonstrates.

This raises the unanswerable question about music and meaning. What, if anything, does expression have to do with system? Tao’s performance had clear intent, being included in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Power to the People! festival. The following week Angela Davis was scheduled in the festival to speak at Disney Hall, the famed philosopher and controversial activist herself having spent her career painstakingly examining systemic causes of social injustice and racism, especially within prisons, and the functioning of capitalist society. Those happen to be issues in some of Rzewski’s best-known pieces, such as “Coming Together” and “Attica,” which were written in response to the 1971 New York prison uprising.

The most impressive and important composer-pianist of our time, Rzewski (pronounced ZHEV-ski) is also the most politically outspoken of major composers. While much of his music is simply music for music’s sake, he has used various Marxist texts in his scores, and he never appears to write without purpose. The purpose matters crucially in “People United,” but that has only as much to do with politics as you care to read into it. It’s up to the listener. Rzewski himself is of little help.

He is a composer with an impeccable pedigree, having studied with notables such as Walter Piston at Harvard and Roger Sessions at Princeton. He is a formidable pianist who in his early career specialized in the technically near-impossible works of the likes of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others in the avant-garde. Improvisation is central to his thinking, and in the mid-’60s he briefly played in the ultra-experimental Italian improvising collection Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (with Ennio Morricone) before helping to form his own even more radical one, Musica Elettronica Viva, with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum.

Around this time, Rzewski went through a crisis fearing that advanced music had become so complex as to be generally unintelligible and thus had lost its communicability, to say nothing of its ability to relate to the issues of life. He then sought through “humanist realism” to unite the many ways of making modern music as a model for uniting us as people. Hence “People United” served as an example of relating diverse elements through the force of logic, which the composer Christian Wolff says, in his notes to Oppens’ recording of “People United,” reminds us of the “reasonableness of justice.”

This is accomplished through the glory of a variation form that works like this, if you have the gumption to try to follow it. The theme, 36 bars long, is followed by 36 variations, divided into six groups of six. In each of the six groups, the six variations go through six stages. The first five stages are simple events — rhythms, melodies, counterpoints, harmonies. The sixth is a summation of the previous five. In the last group, each variation sums up a variation from the five previous groups. For the final group, everything that had gone before is condensed into a spectacular implosion of coming together.

Trust me, you’ll get lost trying to stick to this road map, and it won’t matter. When the theme returns once more after all that, it’s as if it has the whole world in its hands. It’s the world, not the numbers, not its quanta, we experience. Rzewski’s world can be bluesy, Bachian, Beethovenian, Boulezian, Coltrane-ian, Pete Seeger-ian, Webernian, Cagean, Feldmanian. The list (and Liszt) goes on. The “People United” theme can be hinted at with next to no notes or fistfuls of them.

To make room for all, Rzewski exaggeratedly violates the idea of his structure without violating its reliability. Indeed, the permanence is what permits the fancy, rather like the way the tensile support of Buckminster Fuller’s architecture allowed him freedom in the design.

In just that way, the tensile strength of Rzewski’s structure makes room for extreme variation, for mistakes, for imperfection. “If you want to make music to be like life, it has to be imperfect,” he said in a BBC radio interview years ago. I want it to be like life.” Rzewski doesn’t hesitate to extend his structure with cadenzas, allude to other political songs or make room for an optional improvisation in the 36th variation.

The brilliance of “People United” is the way listening to it becomes, in the end, apolitical, whichever side you may be on. You cheer on a pianist not being defeated by this torturous score. You take your own pleasure not being defeated by this tsunami of unstoppable invention. The progression of musical insights into a seemingly straightforward theme vindicates the concept of unity made up of diverse elements, not, Wolff concludes, to be confused with conformity.

Starting points

“The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” has been much recorded.

Ursula Oppens, for whom it was written, is the source, bringing solid conviction and tangible strength in a performance you can find on YouTube.

Marc-André Hamelin offers an unprecedented display of old-school virtuosity in his Hyperion recording.

Igor Levit finds new nuance. It’s also on YouTube.

The composer’s own fascinating three commercial recordings, each different, are not easy to come by. But the excellent socialist that he is, Rzweski has made the bulk of his printed scores and around 100 hours of his performances available for free on the Petrucci Music Library website (although, for copyright reasons, not “People United”).

In the early 1980s, a British writer living in Japan decided that, as a Westerner, he couldn’t understand Japan unless he walked its 2,000-mile length. As Alan Booth recounted in his marvelous book about the trek, “The Roads to Sata,” a Japanese friend at his farewell dinner in Tokyo told Booth that he should count the number of steps he takes. Why? Because no one knows how many it takes to cross Japan.

In fact, 15 years earlier, a Japanese composer, holed up in Nagano prefecture in central Japan with a pair of scores by Debussy for inspiration, came up with a way to traverse the 6,700 miles separating his piano and New York in just 11 steps. Toru Takemitsu was writing “November Steps” for traditional Japanese instruments and the New York Philharmonic, an experiment in authentically bridging East and West in classical music in ways never before thought feasible.

These steps can connote the dan, the sections in Japanese Noh theater, but only in a vague way. Takemitsu further suggested that they are variations, although they’re not really.

It turns out to be easier to say what “November Steps” is not rather than what it is. The score is not cultural appropriation. The California roll wouldn’t have its first mention in The Times for an additional dozen years, and, although the 36-year-old composer who was the leading light in making a new kind of music from Japanese and Western sources, Takemitsu was having nothing to do with palatable musical fusion.

What Takemitsu was after in a strange and radical work — one that grabs a listener by the lapel, with hard shakes and rattles and shoves — is a dialogue that is no dialogue at all. There is no agreement because agreement is beyond point, because there is no right or wrong. There are no power plays, no dominant or secondary roles played. Like birds singing in a forest full of other sounds, there are only differences.

Takemitsu didn’t originally plan to use the title “November Steps.” He told the New York Philharmonic it would be called “Water Rings” until the painter Jasper Johns noted that Americans would miss the metaphysical meaning. For them water rings are the scum left in a dirty bathtub. All the better, Takemitsu thought, to illustrate the role language plays in cultural exchange, but he politely took the advice and pointed the title specifically toward the upcoming November premiere and with yet another meaning.

This score was a new step for world music, for the composer, for American orchestras, for the up-and-coming Seiji Ozawa (who conducted the premiere and made the first recording), and for the whole thorny issue of race relations that ever more demands our attention.

“I don’t like things that are pure and refined,” Takemitsu said in the 1994 documentary “Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu,” made two years before his death. Besides his large body of concert work, Takemitsu scored more than 100 films, several of them classics of Japanese cinema, such as “Woman in the Dunes,” “Empire of Passion” and “Ran.” Takemitsu adored film and claimed to see about 300 a year. Ply him with a couple of beers after a concert and the composer could happily regale a gathering until late in the night with his love for cheesy science fiction movies; he knew them all. It was at one such Tanglewood summer evening whence came my guilty Godzilla pleasures.

He wrote every kind of film music imaginable, from tuneful pop to violently aggressive avant-garde. Besotted with the music of Olivier Messiaen, one of his greatest influences, Takemitsu was radicalized by “Cage Shock.” The aftermath of John Cage’s 1962 visit to Japan at the invitation of Yoko Ono and her then-husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, led Takemitsu to overcame his distaste for traditional Japanese music. He immediately began experimenting with using koto and other native instruments to downright creepy effect in the horror film “Kwaidan.”

It was Ozawa’s idea, however, that Takemitsu consider combining with orchestra in “November Steps” the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute capable of evoking the sound of wind in the forest, and the plucked biwa, themselves representing different traditions of Japanese music. Takemitsu resisted, not wanting the score to come across as cheap exoticism. Ozawa assured him it would only if that is what he wanted.

Nearly everything about “November Steps” is divisive. The biwa player sits on one side of the stage in front of a string section, a percussion section and a harp. The shakuhachi is symmetrically on the other with its string and percussion sections and harp. Only the winds and brass, furthest back on the stage, are in the middle.

The 20-minute score begins with a small pop from a harp and slinky string phrases. There short melodic motifs and delicious Messiaen-like harmonies encompassed in extraordinary percussive and orchestral effects evocative of nature at its most supernatural.

The way the first shakuhachi solo eerily arises out of low notes in the cellos and basses, it might have blown in from the gust of uncontrollable wind, breathy, pitches bent, like a force of nature, yet unerringly human. The biwa responds, a different element. The soloist have little to say to each other and less to the Western instruments. They don’t ask for dialogue but simply expect to be heard.

Halfway through, after sections of contrast with the orchestra and without, comes an eight-minute cadenza for the two soloists. Each gets phrases, in a graphic notation that allows considerable freedom, to be played in any order. Each instrument remains in its own psychic, acoustic and physical space; and each remains a fascination. If a symbiotic relationship can be discerned, and I think one can, that must come from the listener not making judgments, merely maintaining interest. Among Takemitsu’s nebulous pronouncements was that performance is about listening, not producing sounds.

Takemitsu told a story about the premiere. The New York Philharmonic was not, at first, receptive. The music was difficult, foreign, ugly to culturally unevolved ears, went nowhere. The soloists were an intrusion. But these New Yorkers couldn’t mistake the astonishing playing of the soloists, and the score slowly sunk in. After the final performance, the elated composer skipped the obligatory dinner — probably not a sci-fi crowd, anyway — and, wanting to be alone, he walked up the Upper West Side that chilly November evening. “My first New York November steps,” he wrote in a short essay about the piece, “had finally been taken.”

Those steps got longer. Attuned to nature and consequently the seasons, Takemitsu became increasingly autumnal, the season he most turned to in his music. In 1973 he wrote “In an Autumn Garden” for the ancient court gagaku orchestra and “Autumn,” a second work for shakuhachi and biwa soloists with orchestra. His last pieces included “A String Around Autumn” (a beautiful, melancholic viola concerto), “Ceremonial: An Autumn Ode” and the most beguiling arrangement of “Autumn Leaves” you’ll ever hear.

In Japan, autumn is a season that echoes both loneliness and gatherings, so exquisitely exhibited in Yasujiro Ozu’s late autumn-themed films. You can’t appreciate one aspect without the other. The cultural journey that began for Takemitsu in “November Steps” led to something far beyond fusion and not exactly integration. He transcended the whole concept of East and West, his oneness being the oneness of our physical reality in which an electron can be both a particle and a wave at the same time. His last solo piano piece, written for Peter Serkin, is “The Ocean Has No East & West.”

At a time when our own society has its grave strivings for cultural identity, the greater demands for voices to be listened to than for dialogue, Takemitsu’s becomes an unlikely but urgent voice of promise.

Starting points

Ozawa made the first recording of “November Steps” shortly after the premiere but with his own orchestra at the time, the Toronto Symphony, joined by original soloists Kinshi Tsuruta and Katsuya Yokoyama. It was first released as the last side of a two-LP set with Messiaen’s “Turangalila” Symphony and proved a sensation, and it has been on various CD collections.

Ozawa recorded “November Steps” again decades later with greater sophistication with his Japanese Saito Kinen Orchestra on a CD joined by the wondrous viola concerto “A String Around Autumn.” The soloists are the same as they are on all the other recordings, including one with a luminous Concertgebouw Orchestra under a stiff Bernard Haitink and an exceptionally well-recorded performance from the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra conducted by Hiroshi Wakasugi.

Here comes the sun — again.

Alive to a radiant democratic spirit taking hold in Europe and alongside a new appreciation of the natural world, the 40-year-old Joseph Haydn composed six revolutionary string quartets in 1772. The Opus 20 quartets gave independence to the ensemble’s four individual voices, revealed the string quartet potential for uniquely intimate expression and surveyed the wider world as the irrepressibly sneaky Haydn slipped in hidden references to folk song and dance. Their radiance inspired a Dutch publisher to put an etching of the rising sun on the cover of the scores, and they’ve been known ever since as the “Sun” quartets.

A little over 200 years later, a 40-something Terry Riley made his first venture into the string quartet with “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.” The composer who launched Minimalism with “In C” had over the years become a planetary music pack rat, and he found the string quartet to be a haven for bebop, Bartók, north Indian raga, Ravel, Renaissance vocal music and whatnot.

Riley’s string quartets, in cahoots with the indomitable Kronos Quartet, went on to revolutionize chamber music once more. It was in no small part thanks to Riley’s influence that Kronos found its voice and its own planetary mission of making the string quartet a universal medium, amenable to a vaster range of musical genres, nationalities, ethnicities and styles than anyone thought possible. The result has led to the commission of more than 1,000 works from composers all over the globe.

In the end, no composer alive has more gratifyingly or influentially proposed how to listen than Terry Riley. No ensemble in history has changed how we might listen to music as has Kronos. And no string quartet since Haydn’s Opus 20 set has been as radiantly “Sun"-soaked as Riley’s “Sun Rings.” It is, then, with this profound peer into the night sky to understand the travails of our planet, that we bring “How to Listen” toward a conclusion.

“Sun Rings” asks us to listen to messages from the solar system that could help us heal our pandemic-plagued and climate-changed Earth. Those messages are known in plasma physics as whistlers, descending tones that are generated by lightning strikes in interplanetary space, including the Earth’s atmosphere. They can be captured in a frequency range audible to our ears as breathily seductive, shrieking and everything between. Music of the spheres may be a concept as old as human imagination and whistlers have been rudimentarily known about for some time, but it has taken a sanguine modern shaman of the string quartet to expose their musicality.

The impetus for “Sun Rings” was a modest commission by NASA, which asked Kronos for a space-centric string quartet on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the space agency’s launch of the Voyager probes in 1977. They included plasma physicist Donald Gurnett’s experiments in which he captured the sounds of whistlers in Jupiter’s atmosphere, and their mysterious hissing sounds reminded Riley of his own work with tape music in the Bay Area in the early 1960s. He went back into the studio to electronically enhance the space sounds that Gurnett gave him and that would accompany the strings.

I spent a couple of hours with Gurnett in his office at the University of Iowa in 2002 the morning of the “Sun Rings” premiere, and I left filled with a sense of the sheer marvel of the universe. Riley told me he spent a day with the scientist on their first meeting two years earlier, which made the planetary dream collector dream anew. But it was not until 9/11, which happened as Riley was composing “Sun Rings,” that he understood that the essence of “Sun Rings” would have to be about considering the Earth from the broad perspective of space.

The warring claim from all beliefs that God was on their side most inspired Riley to add to his musical duties of planetary dream collector those of planetary prayer collector and added a chorus that could enunciate those prayers in their many languages, just as he used many musical languages in all his quartets. He further found his path though poet and novelist Alice Walker’s response to the terrorist attack, that we must strive to be “One Earth, one people, one love.” Outer space became for Riley — as it does for all astronauts, real ones and the rest of us — a place to look down at ourselves and our environment.

Before long, “Sun Rings” outgrew NASA’s original commission for a 20-minute quartet and became an evening-length project. It included background space sounds, some triggered via electronic sensors by the string players, a chorus gathered locally for each performance and an elaborate visual design by Willie Williams, who is best known for illuminating big rock shows. Added commissioners, such as the University of Iowa and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, helped to fund it. Kronos has since taken the work around the world.

The 10 movements of “Sun Rings” are a kind of mythical voyage. Riley has always had a fondness for offbeat (and Beat Generation) titles. The sun has no rings; Riley’s title comes from the fantasy of Swiss outsider artist Adolf Wölfi. The sounds of whistlers whorl overhead at the start, in “Hero Danger,” as the four members of the quartet toss a carefree theme around, as if in anticipation of a great adventure. Grooving through the “Beebopterismo,” they arrive at “Planet Elf Sindoori,” Venus-like in its beauty. Jupiter gets a sloppy, wet whistler kiss. “Prayer Central” is the centerpiece, a polyphony of prayers. “One Earth, One People, One Love” is the final destination.

All of this makes for essential listening as we end our dazed year of the pandemic. Our attention has been, as it must be, on our diseased planet and its terrible fires, on our social upheavals, on our lives upturned and lost. We’ve mistrusted science when we’ve wanted to not worry about consequences, and yet we expect it to minister to our needs and, if we’re sick, cure us.

But how quickly we’ve forgotten how slowing our activity and reducing pollution during the worldwide lockdown unlocked our view of the heavens thanks to the clearest skies in eons. In April, we also got further notice of music of the spheres with the capturing of radio waves by a Canadian radio telescope with the appropriate acronym of CHIME. We’ve been sending missions into space all year. One of NASA’s became the first to scoop up dirt from asteroid and bring it home. China’s unmanned Chang’e 5 moon launch returned on Dec. 16, Beethoven’s 250th birthday, with our first samples of moon dust from its dark side.

What hasn’t gotten widespread attention but most of all offers cause to rejoice is the Borexino Experiment in L’Aquila, Italy, where this year neutrinos from the sun were discovered that hold clues into the processes that power the sun. Marshall these neutrinos and perhaps they promise solutions for our own excessive energy needs.

Could this underground laboratory in central Italy be Prayer Central?

“Sun Rings” shine on.

Starting points

It took nearly two decades for the Kronos Quartet to record “Sun Rings.” Nonesuch decided not to make a video. (You can find performance footage onYouTube.) But let the music speak for itself, and it does utterly. The recording is lovingly made (I can attest to that, having helped out slightly with a program note), and it won a Grammy this year for its exceptional engineering.

Nonesuch has been Kronos Central for most of the quartet’s existence, and on the occasion of Riley’s 80th birthday five years ago, the label put out a one-CD selection and a box set of all of Kronos’ Riley recordings.

Meanwhile, Haydn’s “Sun” quartets are well represented on recordings, most recently with all-guns-firing performances from Stanford University’s St. Lawrence String Quartet and an alluringly eloquent reading from the exquisite Chiaroscuro Quartet.