I can’t stop myself from sprinkling podcast summaries into most of my conversations. “I listened to this really neat podcast about Indian architecture and climate change the other day,” I’ll begin at coffee with friends. “There was a great podcast about the beauty of maintenance I listened to the other day,” I’ll interject at my mom. “I heard Bill Murray on the Steinway podcast a couple weeks ago, and he said…” I call my husband at work.
I love them and also feel a kind of panic at their vastness. All those talkers with their peculiarities, solutions, joys, and intrigues are innumerable. Where do I start? Steinway has a podcast that’s a Steinway guy talking with musicians about how Steinways are great. Classical Classroom is a librarian talking about why classical composers are geniuses. Song Exploder is mostly pop musicians telling us why they’re geniuses. I gobble all of it up, usually while doing chores. I mop and listen to how Regency clothing trends are why I can’t find pants with real pockets. I dust the light fixtures and thrill at the possibility of spying on China via my corn crop. Doing dishes, it’s Shakespeare. I listened to an endless series about the endless awfulness of the guy who popularized hot yoga in the US. I don’t even do yoga. Nor am I intentionally hot. Ever.
The reality is that podcasts—the endless, nonstop chatter—aren’t nearly as vast as the world. Listening to podcasts, for me, is a kind of willful belief in the illusion that the whole complex, churning world of music, art, architecture, literature, family, finances…that all of it can be grasped, all of it can be paid attention to. My ignorance, my brevity, my loneliness are all minor issues to rectify in the course of a twenty-minute chore. I think there’s a false confidence we all don occasionally, from podcasts or maybe an episode of Sixty Minutes or maybe a great feature in The Atlantic. And then we’re carrying around little fragments of someone else’s expertise, satisfied. But the truth is we can’t be all things, intelligent in all ways, informed on all issues. The nature of human experience is we’re caught in a kind of perpetual periphery. When you’re a real expert (not a podcast expert), you’re so caught up in the frontier of your field that you barely have time to potter in what you do know. It’s only those of us living in firmly occupied territory who are content to bandy our one article over a latte.
But the thing is, life is huge. If you get to live long enough, you’ll bump into the limitations not only of time but of your own abilities and ideas and choices. Here I am. I’m not going to join a band and live on the road (this would ruin Dashiell’s hard-won nap schedule). I’m in no danger of becoming a protégé (what if you come into your artistic self in your forties? And why don’t we care as much about artists who get great later?). I won’t be a tenure-track professor or a garbage man or a professional tiler or a tour guide in Turkey or a grandmotherly Corsican. I’m all in on the granular reality of knowing exactly what it feels like to step in the lunch being ejected from my son’s mouth.
And I’m not making the case that I’m stuck in some drab menial life of cleaning my floors for the thousandth time when I could be in a rock band. I’m too old to be a protégé and I’m too old to romanticize glamour. We all have something menial to do every day. Many somethings menial, actually. And I love those intimacies. The smell of your baby’s hair, the stage whisper of a four-year-old at 5:00 every morning (Every. Morning.), the material reality of this life, carved in this way. It’s these details that catch my heart, really. They make me feel like life is knowable, like I’m the keeper of something sacred and particular.
So we face this strange intersection of the humble and the grand, the poetry of spilled milk. We give chase to the glimmer in hopes of seeing a whole phenomenal star. And musicians have to chase everything: the architects and writers and philosophers (basically all the wearers of black turtlenecks) and trace the contours of emotional life in the whole vast, churning, complex modernity of life now and life during the world wars and life in the grand, gothic halls of power and money and life as an insurance salesman.
I mean, they don’t have to. But isn’t it pleasanter to do so? Isn’t it easier to sink into a Cramer etude if you know a little something about how the fabric of a Regency dress might slide over your legs and the piano bench might creak in your little family home with its modest instrument that would always be a little out of tune? Isn’t it remarkable that Jane Austen practiced before breakfast because women’s family routines have been making them early risers for centuries? Isn’t it lovely in this overwhelming life with all of its crushing limitations to feel like you are enveloped in the experiences of things that were and things that are, that somehow the meager now of you is transcendable? Or rather, isn’t it lovely to keep all these small moments and feel them stitching us all together, all of us struggling with our little fragment of the cosmos?
Podcasts are reductive. They are stories. They’re stories about market crises or stories about the court system or stories about a novelist. They have to have a narrative arc. They skim ideas. They’re much tidier than life. But they’re reductive in the best way, too: they draw our focus to this Jewish baseball player, sycamore trees, this sonnet. They give me access to the textures of a life outside my own. In this way, they’re not so different from the experience of music. It is both cosmically universal and also atomically specific. To quote David Bentley Hart quoting Augustine: “not only superior summo meo - beyond my utmost heights - but also interior intimo meo - more inward to me than my inmost depths.” Okay, sometimes my podcasts are just tips about getting your student loan refinanced. I’m not crazy here. But I do feel like my interior world has been populated with a handful of details I’m really keen to hold onto.
So, here are several podcasts I love, and not all of them are about classical music, but all of them are about the beauty of the human experience in some form or another.
David Walliams' Marvellous Musical Podcast (this one's got a lot of bad jokes [by which I mean fart jokes] but it's kind of weird and wonderful, too)
The Memory Palace (This is the podcast that started my love for this kind of listening and storytelling. These are beautiful and exactly about a kind of peering into another's small experiences. I have so many favorites that made me cry or laugh or call my husband at work to make him talk with me about the purpose of art or whatever.)
Not quite a podcast but similar and wonderful for relearning math you knew for a test once:
And here's a little Cramer Etude I recorded at my mom's house last week. Cheers.
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