Loving Music Till It Hurts

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 <em>butchered</em> or <em>mangled</em> the Star-Spangled Banner at the Super Bowl. An underrehearsed cover band <em>made a mockery</em> of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite <em>do justice</em> to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and in need of fierce protection. <p/>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 turn: 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. <em>Loving Music Till It Hurts</em> 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?<br>