"But communication is two-sided - vital and profound communication makes demands also on those who are to receive it... demands in the sense of concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated"
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Sessions, a modernist composer who spent his life asking audiences to follow him into thornier musical terrain, isn’t making a polite plea for “active listening.” He’s drawing a line in the sand about what art is for and who is responsible for its meaning. The phrase “two-sided” sounds democratic, but the rest of the sentence tightens the screws: “vital and profound” communication isn’t free, and it isn’t frictionless. It “makes demands.” On you.
That’s the subtext: in a culture that treats the audience as sovereign (the customer is always right, the playlist must always please), Sessions argues that the receiver has obligations. “Concentration” and “genuine effort” aren’t moral ornaments; they’re the admission price for work that refuses to flatter. He’s defending difficulty as a feature of seriousness, not a bug of elitism. The ellipses do quiet rhetorical work too, letting the thought unfold like a rehearsal note: he’s not scolding so much as insisting, patiently, that receiving is an act.
Context matters. Sessions wrote and taught in an American 20th century defined by mass media’s smoothness and modernism’s resistance to it. New music often met the complaint that it “doesn’t communicate.” Sessions flips the charge: perhaps it does communicate, but the listener has been trained to expect instant legibility, not sustained encounter. His argument is less about gatekeeping than about attention as a cultural practice. Profound communication, he implies, is a collaboration: the composer proposes, but the listener must show up fully enough for the proposal to land.
That’s the subtext: in a culture that treats the audience as sovereign (the customer is always right, the playlist must always please), Sessions argues that the receiver has obligations. “Concentration” and “genuine effort” aren’t moral ornaments; they’re the admission price for work that refuses to flatter. He’s defending difficulty as a feature of seriousness, not a bug of elitism. The ellipses do quiet rhetorical work too, letting the thought unfold like a rehearsal note: he’s not scolding so much as insisting, patiently, that receiving is an act.
Context matters. Sessions wrote and taught in an American 20th century defined by mass media’s smoothness and modernism’s resistance to it. New music often met the complaint that it “doesn’t communicate.” Sessions flips the charge: perhaps it does communicate, but the listener has been trained to expect instant legibility, not sustained encounter. His argument is less about gatekeeping than about attention as a cultural practice. Profound communication, he implies, is a collaboration: the composer proposes, but the listener must show up fully enough for the proposal to land.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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