Loving Music Till It Hurts

by William Cheng

Can music feel pain? Do songs possess dignity? Do symphonies have rights? Of course not, you might say. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated. A singer butchered or mangled the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. An underrehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite do justice to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and in need of fierce protection. There's nothing wrong with the human instinct to safeguard beloved music . . . except, perhaps, when this instinct leads us to hurt or neglect fellow human beings in say, by heaping outsized shame upon those who seem to do music wrong; or by rushing to defend a conductor's beautiful recordings while failing to defend the multiple victims who have accused this maestro of sexual assault. Loving Music Till It Hurts is a capacious exploration of how people's head-over-heels attachments to music can variously align or conflict with agendas of social justice. How do we respond when loving music and loving people appear to clash?

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

410 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2019

Reviews

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving Music Till It Hurts is not a book to be read quickly or taken lightly. Each chapter requires concentration and a willingness to be introspective. William Cheng uses each chapter to examine a different topic prompted by an event from the past 13 years: Joshua Bell playing his violin in a Washington, DC subway; Susan Boyle's moment of popularity; reality shows that judge according to the contestants' musical talent, at least to some extent; "blind" orchestral auditions and how bias still creeps in; and others. The final chapter was, for me, the most difficult to get through as it involves a white man shooting at a car of four unarmed black teenagers and killing one of them in a conflict initiated by the teens' music. Cheng goes beyond the case notes and trial transcripts to letters the shooter/murderer sent from prison.

Even in discussing more benign situations, Cheng examines them from many angles and in great depth, inviting the reader to consider what they might do in a similar situation. As with Cheng's previous book, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good , he investigates the ties between music and humanity, taking two abstract concepts and finding concrete examples of the connections between the two. Loving Music Till It Hurts invites the reader to scrutinize their own sense of humanity; in my personal experience, reading Cheng's work is revelatory and helps me re-think my personal ties to music so I feel as though I become a better person, more open to connecting with other people. This may not be everyone's reaction, to be fair. But if you give this book some special attention and personal investment, I think you'll gain a lot of insight.

[Robin Shakespeare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricately constructed, building a careful thread of points up to a conclusion of screaming relevance.

Every moment is compelling. Its dynamic back-and-forth makes it perfect for classes, often with clear two-sided debates (though this structure itself is frequently critiqued and complicated). Philosophers and media critics introduced are contemporary and compelling, and I can't wait to read more based on Cheng's concise introductions.

The author also regularly steps back, allowing another voice the time to present a detailed case. This lent the text richness, and a sense of genuinely open dialogue around sensitive topics of disability, race and gender.

I was wary of the inclusion of a Britney Spears section, and it did linger on certain stories long enough to feel voyeuristic in itself, to me- but perhaps his intention was to allow the reader to discover their own discomfort, rather than press the point. Either way, I found his final analysis personal and human.

My understanding of race, gender and disability discourses and their relations to music have grown in nuance, and I'm grateful for this book.

(For readers considering it, the main body is 232 full-to-the-brim pages.)

[Leanna Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first started reading the book, within the first chapter I found myself thinking "every music teacher in higher-ed should read this book". By the next it turned to "every music teacher", then "every musician", and finally to "anyone who loves music".

The topics of each chapter cannot be taken lightly. In each Cheng investigates matters pertaining to gender, disability, and race. Humanity and bias. Cheng invites the reader to investigate their own relationship to music and how that might create bias on one hand or connection in the other.

While the book is a deep-dive analysis (that honestly deserves a whole course of discussion), it is also deeply human, personal, and insightful. I am grateful to have read it.

[SY · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long due and very urgent book. Musicology is about a decade behind the rest of the humanities really in terms of critical engagement I think. On the rare occasion that the issue of race, gender and class are addressed, there's still a tendency to dance around these issues vis-a-vis some variant of conventional close reading, or else, resolve the tension through/in the musical text, as though to say: yes the situation is dire, but listen isn't the music just *oh so pretty...*

But not here - all the skeletons are out in the open, and remain in the foreground throughout this book, which is why it has been so refreshing. I can see how one might fault this book for a lack of technical-analytical engagement with the musical texts, but, I mean, it's not like those aren't already common elsewhere!

This book should be assigned reading for all graduate level students in music.

[Jay Jolles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cheng's overwhelmingly lucid and sharp critique makes him the type of scholar that both makes me want to never write again and also write all the time. This book is incredible.