New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff’s new book Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways To Listen In An Age Of Musical Plenty takes on an almost impossible task: how to make sense of the overwhelming wealth of recorded music out there. Even the most committed musicologist can only listen to a fraction of what’s available; to become a critical, thoughtful listener, where does anyone even begin?

Ratliff rejects, on the one hand, canonical or hierarchical, and on the other, naive or poptimist approaches to listening to music, and instead looks for ways to map relationships between songs, bodies, physical space and each listener’s personal history and bank of experience that become richer with time.

The musical values he uses to group different sections of the book range from speed and slowness to proximity – between musicians playing together, and musicians and audiences. Several of these relate to physicality, and ways of connecting formal elements of music to how they are experienced. He answers our questions on his book below.

Because of the book’s subtitle, I thought it was going to be about the proliferation of music on YouTube and SoundCloud and all over the internet, and the impact of those platforms on listening. Instead it’s about ways of listening.

When I was first thinking about the book, I was thinking a lot about two things. One was the fact that this change that we’ve been through, where we have infinite access to what seems like everything, really has changed the way we listen, and possibly the way we think about music, and certainly the way we value it. And then at the same time, I started getting interested in reading old music appreciation books from the first half of the 20th century, which, in a very generous way, would say: ‘Everybody loves music, but many people don’t really know what to listen for, so we’re going to show you. And we’ll show you with regard to this canon of music, which is the music that we think, you know, any reasonably educated person ought to know about.’

And I didn’t like the canon idea, and I knew the book had to be written differently if a book like that were to be written now. In those books, the categories of what to listen for are the constituent parts of a composition: melody, harmony, rhythm. And then there are musical conventions, like so-called sonata form, oratorio and all that stuff. I thought: break out of that, bring it over to the listeners’ side, and give ways to listen that are based in listening experiences and not what the composer wants you to understand.

Also the book is a response to… I’m a little worried about what’s going to happen, now that many listeners are becoming dependent on streaming services to feed them, you know? Generally we do whatever’s most efficient around listening. And that makes sense, and that’s really authentic, and that’s fine. But the streaming services are really smart, and they want to keep you on the hook, maybe for the rest of your life, and they want to make you feel as if you’re discovering as much as possible. But I think something is being lost or mistranslated about what discovery really is.

For me, ways of listening meant not platforms, but kinds of listening experiences that could link up examples of music that were really far apart, maybe from different centuries or continents, or from different traditions, that in a genre way had absolutely nothing to do with each other. But my assumption is, and my theory is, that listeners are much broader than they are assumed to be by companies like streaming services.

When you’re describing your ways of listening, they often come back to something nobody’s managed to digitise or quantify – the body and physical perceptions. Was that physicality something that you had in mind an antidote to this kind of online digital experience?

Yeah, completely. I thought about how you’re fed music by streaming services, or even by YouTube, the sort of recommendation engine logic, like ‘If you like A you’ll like B’. It often has to do with genre. And I started thinking about genre… I mean I like tradition, I really do, but I think genre is different from tradition. I think genre is something created by spectators and merchants in order to sell. And tradition is created by participants and musicians, and it makes a musical language grow, and bigger, and that’s the stuff that really intersects with people’s lives.

Then I started thinking, what are other ways to completely get beyond the idea of genre? It really starts with how you enter into the music that you’re hearing, because music is immersive, and you get inside it, and it’s all around you – and it does connect with the body and motion, and perception and pattern recognition and all that stuff. Even though you can’t put your hands on it, it is the next best thing to being very physical.

At the beginning of the book, you set out this quote from Pierre Schaeffer about the failure of Western notation to encompass all music, and that would probably go for writing about music too. You include examples from lots of different musical traditions – is this something you were very careful of, your cultural position as a writer, as a critic, as a describer of things?

Yeah. A lot of it is very subjective, and I needed to say so. The book is not presenting a canon as the old music appreciation books did. It’s not about limiting, it’s about expansion. And another thing that I tried to make clear is that these are suggestions for a spirit of listening, not definitive ways – these are not the only 20, or a necessary 20 – your 20 might be completely different from mine. The other thing besides description that I like to do in my work is to draw connections, and I think it’s really exciting putting Nick Drake next to Slayer. I think it’s exciting putting Curtis Mayfield next to João Gilberto, or whatever. Because those names don’t often go together, and I feel that I don’t like the logic whereby those names never go together. I want to create a logic whereby those names can go together. It’s a suggestion and a kind of experiment.

In the chapter on completists, you describe investment in a particular artist’s body of work in terms of being a ‘cognitive shareholder’. This seemed like an unusual choice of phrase because it’s very Silicon Valley, very digital, and almost in opposition to a lot of the chapters that had come before. Could you explain more about that term?

I was trying to get at the idea of partial ownership. What does it mean to feel like you have a definite investment in a piece of music, such that it is partially yours? And it’s about you. And it’s something that you can claim for yourself and sort of graft on to yourself. That’s what I mean by being a partial shareholder. Did that seem against the spirit of the book because the rest of the book was not so much about ownership?

Yes, the rest of the book was more about exchange and interaction and communication. But you also have the counter example of someone who might be listening to Merzbow, where it would be almost impossible to get through all of the catalogue, and if you did you’d be missing the point. Is this idea of ownership in opposition to these other comparative ways of listening?

It is a different spirit. When there’s so much stuff made by a single artist, and it all seems like chunks of an ongoing discourse, then the question becomes: so, is the only way to really know this person to hear it all? If one thing doesn’t really encapsulate all of it, it’s more about knowing all of it, but how can you do that, and what does that take? How much time in your life does that eat up?

That chapter also suggests another idea of time that collectors, completists and superfans invest in listening. You describe a vertical versus a linear sensibility, the ‘I’m going to collect everything’ approach, as opposed to the idea of following somebody and listening to artists change and age. It’s a rebuttal to the idea of flatness and internet time, where everything is always available and anything just gets added to the sludge of now. The idea of age, and time, and experiencing music in time, seems to recur a lot throughout the book.

In the Rutgers University jazz studies programme, they believe in teaching the work of jazz musicians by studying it in chronological order. I don’t know if this is department wide, programme wide, but I know that certain professors insist that this is the only way to learn. And that does seem to make a lot of sense to me, because it does connect to history, not just recording history, but the history going on around [each artist]. So you start to think a little more in line with how they thought. You start to see the decisions they took as maybe solutions to a problem they’d been having, or reactions to other things going on around them.

Later, you have a long section about The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, where you analyse every element of its production and discuss how it could have only have come from that time and place. How does that connect with Simon Reynolds’s argument in Retromania of how, because you can listen to anything made since recorded music started, so much music comes unanchored from context?

One thing that comes to mind is that when you’re listening online through streaming services or on YouTube, a lot of the metadata is not there. You will see a name of a track, and the name of the artist, and you might see the name of the album that it comes from. You might see a tiny reproduction of an album cover. But often that’s about it. And you won’t know the names of the musicians who played on it, you’re not given any dates, you’re not told who the producer was – and also it’s in a uniform typeface of the platform. So you just can’t get any clues. Whereas when you were dealing with physical objects, you had all that information, and you also had other clues that might be given to you, just through the look of the typography, or the design or the smell of it – the feel of the cardboard – that told you something about the context that it came from. And that does trouble me, actually, that all that metadata is just not there. And it doesn’t seem like there’s a great rush to correct that.

Do you see this book as providing a way to talk about music that isn’t digital, isn’t canonical – to remove barriers of expertise that stop debate, and instead, get people talking?

Yes, exactly. A spirit of listening that might suggest a vocabulary for talking about music and making connections across what is called genre. So people would be able to hear something that they had never heard before, and their first reaction might be, ‘This is nothing to do with me, I’m not going to pay attention”, but instead, rather than deciding to not pay attention, that they might say, ‘Well, this has something in common with something I already know. Maybe this can be about me too—maybe I can claim that this is for me as well.’

Ben Ratliff’s Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways To Listen In An Age Of Musical Plenty is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, and Allen Lane in the UK. The book was reviewed by Britt Brown in The Wire 385. Subscribers to The Wire can read that, and hundreds of other reviews, articles and features via the online archive.