A recent discussion I had with Aryeh Tepper has just appeared in The Omni-American Review. It is titled: “Deep Listening in a Chaotic Soundscape: Thinking about Music with Dan Asia.”
I sometimes speak on the relationship between Judaism and Classical Music. I often start with the following comment: I only have three small goals. The first is to write the very best music I can. The second is to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. And the third is to ensure the survival of Western civilization. If I succeed at only one, I will be successful, but I work on all three.
This discussion in The Omni-American Review unites those three interests. Here is what Aryeh has to say about it in his incisive introduction:
“If Murray and Marsalis help us to hear jazz as a vehicle for forming character and testing nobility, they are joining a long, if often neglected, intellectual tradition that treats music not as background or thoughtless entertainment, but as a force shaping the souls of individuals and the character of communities. That tradition, stretching from classical philosophy through the Hebrew Bible to modern composers and critics, is one of the conversations that The Omni-American Review intends to cultivate and extend. “Deep Listening in a Chaotic Soundscape: Thinking about Music with Dan Asia” situates the contemporary concert hall, synagogue, and city street inside that larger story. Composed as an interview, I ask Asia, a serious working composer, about music, transcendence, time, and the disciplines of listening that can help us distinguish sound from noise and make sense of our overloaded sonic environment. From Heschel’s “architecture of time” and Berio’s stylized portrait of sonic clutter in “Sinfonia” to Asia’s defense of music as a high art that demands active, attentive listening, the conversation invites us to listen again, and more deeply, to the worlds of sound we already inhabit.”
You can find the interview here: https://omniamericanfuture.org/deep-listening-in-a-chaotic-soundscape-thinking-about-music-with-dan-asia/
