MUSICALITY FOR MODERN HUMANS

A seasoned Nashville musician and journalist presents stories and techniques for listening to music with new ears.

Havighurst argues that anyone can deepen their relationship with music by learning to “listen like an artist”: shifting from passive, song-centered consumption to active, sound-focused engagement that enriches musicality, empathy, and cultural awareness. He makes his case in several parts that blend memoir, information regarding neuroscience, portraits of musicians, and cultural criticism. Havighurst’s own formative epiphanies in high school orchestra, and a transformative encounter with the music of Richard Wagner at a listening booth in the British Museum, set the stage for a larger argument about attention, openness, and the physicality of sound. He takes the reader on a tour of music fundamentals—tone, harmony, rhythm, and timbre—and shows in crisp, appropriately technical prose how the brain organizes them into meaning. Along the way, Havighurst laments how a general drift toward passive, algorithm-guided habits and American listeners’ widening distance from instrumental and composed music have resulted in an unbalanced and diminished collective musical diet. To counter this, he supplies approachable examples from popular, composed, and improvised traditions, providing a simple map to today’s overwhelming sonic landscape. The book moves from music’s physical foundations to its role as a cultural practice, mirroring how listeners’ awareness can expand as they deepen their appreciation. It acts as both a manifesto and a practical ear-training companion, showing how attention to texture, gesture, and emotional inflection can help listeners develop humility and empathy. As a music-theory primer, listening guide, and personal narrative, this book succeeds, thanks to its warmth, depth of research, and clarity. Havighurst explains such concepts as timbre (“the mellow fruity voice of a trombone, the velvet bloom of a piano note, the bright clarity of the acoustic guitar, the woody aura of a cello”), dissonance, and rhythm with lucidity, and his autobiographical moments lend the book the feeling of sitting beside a knowledgeable teacher, surrounded by instruments. The result is an inviting, humane work that could recalibrate how readers hear the world.

A warm, wise guide to hearing music—and each other—with renewed clarity.