Towards the International Music Day of 1 October: from Yehudi Menuhin to Beethoven, from jazz to community choirs, a journey into the deepest meaning of listening. Because playing together doesn’t mean being equal, but learning to give space to the voice of others.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
29 September 2026
In 1974 Yehudi Menuhin had a curious idea.
To celebrate the music, he proposed to ask the cities a few minutes of silence.
Not to interrupt urban life. Not to impose a solemn recollection. But to allow the music to resonate in the parks and squares, where it normally passes unnoticed, overwhelmed by traffic, conversations, rush.
A violin instead of a clacson, we could say. With the advantage that the violin, at least as a rule, does not claim to have precedence.
The proposal appeared in the letter with which the violinist, then president of the International Music Council, announced the first International Music Day, set for 1 October 1975. The anniversary was born of a resolution adopted in Lausanne in 1973 and pursued precise objectives: to spread musical art in all layers of society, to foster exchange between cultures and to contribute to the ideals of peace and friendship among peoples.
Fifty-one years later, while we are preparing to celebrate that day again, the Menuhin proposal seems even more unusual.
We have music everywhere today.
In supermarkets. At airports. Cars. In the headphones of those who run, work, kitchen or try to ignore the neighbor on the train.
We can listen to a symphony registered in Berlin while we walk on a provincial road. A Georgian song while waiting for the bus. A Beethoven quartet as we respond to a message that, in all probability, did not require immediate response.
Music has never had so much chance to reach us.
Yet a question remains open: did we become as capable of listening to each other?
Because having access to millions of songs doesn't necessarily mean meeting millions of worlds.
Sometimes it just means bringing our little world everywhere, protected by two earphones.
And perhaps the International Music Day, before even inviting us to listen to something, should ask us to make a more difficult gesture.
Remove the headphones from our certainties for a few moments.
A violinist who wanted to listen to the world
Menuhin could have been limited to celebrating its own tradition.
He was one of the great violinists of the twentieth century, heir to an interpretative culture in which the solo concert represented one of the highest expressions of Western art. He had crossed the repertoire of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Bartók. His career would have allowed him to talk about music from the reassuring position of those who occupy the center of the stage.
He chose instead to broaden his horizon.
In 1966 he recorded with Ravi Shankar, a master of the Indian sitar, the project that would become West Meets East, published in 1967. It was not only a meeting between two instruments: Menuhin confronted Shankar’s music, entering a system in which the melodic organization, intonation, rhythm and improvisation obey principles different from those of European tradition.
And this is the most interesting point.
To really meet another culture, Menuhin could not simply continue to play as he had always done.
He had to listen before he answered.
He had to recognize that his knowledge, immense in his area, did not coincide with all possible musical knowledge.
The rāga is not an exotic scale on which to freely improvise some phrase. It is a melodic universe with characteristic behaviors, hierarchies among sounds, recognizable movements and expressive associations. In the same way, the tāla is not a generic pulsation to accompany by beating the foot: it is a cyclic organization of time, articulated by accents, subdivisions and shared reference points.
Entering that world requires study.
And above all it requires a particular form of humility.
Musical dialogue begins when we stop considering our grammar the only possible.
It is a much more demanding lesson of the usual affirmation that music would be a universal language.
That phrase is beautiful.
But he's gonna make us forget something.
Music does not necessarily speak to everyone in the same way. A sound can have different cultural meanings; a rhythm that for someone belongs to a party, for another can have a ritual value. What a listener perceives as distension can be unresolved for another.
We do not automatically understand why we listen to the same sounds.
Music can allow us to meet because we are not obliged to understand it all the same way.
Menuhin seemed to have understood this possibility: the meeting does not require the cancellation of differences, but the availability to attend them.
A counterpoint lesson for our time
There is a musical idea that could offer us a small theory of coexistence.
The counterpoint.
Let's imagine two voices.
The first proposes a melodic line. The second one enters, not to repeat it servely, but to develop its own path. The two lines can proceed together, move in opposite directions, approach, move away, produce tensions.
None of them, however, should lose their identity.
This is the beauty of counterpoint: unity is not born from the renunciation of difference, but from the organization of relationships between autonomous elements.
Let's think of Bach's escape.
A subject appears in one voice, then it is resumed by another. Meanwhile the first does not disappear: he continues his speech, woven with the one just entered.
The listener must perform an extraordinary exercise.
Follow a voice without forgetting the others.
Recognize a theme while changing registry.
Perceiving the overall form without sacrificing the life of individual paths.
Of course an escape is not a political model, nor Bach was writing a civic education manual.
But his music makes something sensitive that we in our daily lives do not necessarily interrupt our voice. It can give you a new meaning.
And you don't have to get to Bach to experiment with it.
Just think of a string quartet.
Four people sit close and try to build a common form. Each has its own instrument, its stamp, its own gesture. The first violin cannot play instead of the cello; the viola cannot decide independently the breath of the entire ensemble.
You must listen to the duration of a note, recognize the moment when another part takes relief, change its volume, wait for a sentence to be concluded.
Sometimes you have to advance.
Sometimes it's back.
Sometimes having the courage to support a dissonance without rushing towards a premature consonance.
And here music suggests an uncomfortable truth.
Harmony is not to have conflicts. It consists in knowing what to do with it.
Jazz and art of not knowing everything
Jazz brings this reflection even further.
In a formation that improvises collectively, music also arises from what no one has decided entirely in advance.
The pianist proposes an agreement with a particular arrangement of notes. The smuggler can change the bass trend. The drummer moves an accent, opens a space, suggests a new articulation of time.
The soloist listens.
Come in.
Give it back.
He can even change the direction of his sentence because something, in the execution of another, showed him an unexpected possibility.
This is one of the reasons why a great jazz improvisation does not coincide with a succession of individual solos.
His quality comes from the relationship.
In swing, then, time is not only the one indicated by the metronome. It is a shared experience, built through the position of accents, phrasing, interaction between pulsation and rhythmic microvariations.
Two musicians can know perfectly the harmonious structure of a song and, however, fail to make it live together.
Because knowing what to play is not like knowing how to be musically with someone.
We think of a passage from John Coltrane, a response from the Miles Davis trumpet or the way a rhythm section can change the perception of a phrase.
There is no authentic dialogue if everyone waits only their turn to demonstrate what they can do.
And perhaps this is one of the great diseases of our time: we learned to take the word with extraordinary speed, but not always to let the word of others change what we were about to say.
Jazz reminds us that an answer can be technically prepared, but must remain open to the unexpected.
In the end, improvising together means accepting something very simple:
the result does not belong entirely to anyone.
Beethoven, joy and brotherhood still to be built
No speech on music as a chance of encounter can avoid Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
His final, built around the hymn to the joy of Schiller, became one of the most recognizable symbols of aspiration to human brotherhood.
But it's worth listening to how Beethoven gets to that melody.
The fourth movement does not begin with the triumphant chorus.
Start with a violent orchestral raid.
Then the cellos and smugglers introduce some kind of instrumental recitative. They appeal to the previous movements, as if the symphony was examining its history, looking for something that has not yet found.
Only after this research emerges the theme of joy.
At first it is very simple.
A mainly joint melody, exposed by serious instruments, far from the rhetoric of triumph.
Then it passes to other sections, it enriches, grows, until it becomes a collective song.
The fraternity, in the musical construction of Beethoven, does not appear as a fact already acquired.
It is the result of a process.
Joy must be sought, recognized, shared.
And this, perhaps, is the particular that we should remember more often.
A crowd singing together is not necessarily a right community. History has shown us how easily collective music can also be used to exclude, intimidate and celebrate power.
Music does not possess, by nature, a guaranteed morality.
It can accompany a gesture of solidarity and, in other circumstances, be bent to propaganda.
It can help recognize another human being, but also strengthen an identity built against someone.
It is not enough, therefore, to sing the brotherhood.
You have to give her a form in life.
And that's where the Ninth continues to question us.
It does not give us proof that human beings are already brothers.
It puts us in front of the possibility — and responsibility — to try to become it.
The music is of all. But can everyone really be part of it?
There is a question that cultural celebrations are likely to evade.
Who can afford to study music?
Not just listening.
To do it.
A child who wants to learn the violin needs a tool, a teacher, time, of someone who encourages it when the first notes look more like the chigolio of a door than a sonata.
A boy who wants to sing needs to find a place where his voice is not judged before being educated.
An adult who wishes to return to play after many years needs to feel authorized to start over.
Accessibility is not only an economic question.
It is also psychological, geographical, educational.
It is not enough to put a piano in a room and announce that everyone can use it. Someone must have taught people not to be afraid of it.
The International Music Council translated this attention into five musical rights, proclaimed in 2001: the freedom to express itself musically, the possibility to learn the languages of music, access to participation and listening; for artists, the possibility to develop and communicate their art and obtain recognition and fair remuneration.
It is important that the two dimensions be together.
Music must be able to reach everyone.
But those who produce it must be able to live their work.
The gratuitousness of a public concert, for example, can be a precious cultural choice. It should not become the pretext to consider the work of interpreters free of charge.
Similarly, bringing music to schools does not simply mean organizing a show at the end of the year.
It means recognizing that musical education offers children a rare experience: learning to express themselves while exercising to recognize the presence of others.
Let's think of a school choir.
It doesn't matter that everyone has the same vocal extension. It doesn't matter that everyone learns at the same speed.
The work begins when each guy finds a part to which to contribute.
When you understand that your entrance also depends on the breath of those who are next to him.
When he discovers that singing stronger than others does not necessarily mean singing better.
And maybe, for once, the usually quieter companion becomes the reference point of the entire group.
They're small experiences.
But a community is also built like this.
Not through great statements on the importance of cohabitation, but through gestures in which that cohabitation is concretely exercised.
What if the music doesn't make us better?
However, one must be wary of temptation: attributing to music an almost miraculous virtue.
Music does not automatically make good.
A great interpreter can be a bad listener in everyday life. An audience can move in front of a work and return, five minutes later, to behave exactly as before.
Esthetic emotion is not a moral certification.
And there is no symphony capable of replacing individual responsibility.
This does not decrease the value of music.
On the contrary, it makes it more interesting.
Because music doesn't make us better.
It offers us an experience in which some human qualities can be exercised.
Careful.
Patience.
Memory.
Ability to wait.
Availability to change your position.
Awareness that the meaning of one voice can change when another enters.
It's not very small.
In a world that tends to turn every conversation into a competition for the last word, listen to an escape or participate in an ensemble can remind us that not all meetings must end with a winner.
There are reports in which the most important result is not to be right.
It is able to build something that, on its own, would not have existed.
Yet it would be naive to think that a concert is enough to produce peace.
Menuhin did not need this naivety.
His project asked instead to create concrete occasions of encounter: concerts, conferences, exchanges between artists, activities in schools, universities, factories, churches, public spaces. The music had to go out of the places where he was already loved to reach those in which he had not yet heard.
Not a magic formula.
Cultural work.
Constant.
Sometimes slow.
And that's why it's necessary.
Coda. A city that listens for a few minutes
Let’s return to that idea of 1974.
A city that interrupts its noise for a few minutes.
Not just to shut up.
To listen.
Let's try to imagine it today.
In a square someone starts playing.
It does not matter, for the moment, whether it is Bach, a traditional melody, a jazz track or a contemporary song.
Someone stops.
Someone else keeps walking.
A child asks what instrument it is.
An elderly person recognizes a melody.
A passer-by discovers a sound he never sought.
No one is obliged to feel the same emotion.
No one must pretend to understand what he doesn't know.
But for a few minutes different people share an experience to which each can attribute its own meaning.
It is a hypothetical image, of course.
But perhaps it contains the deepest sense of the Menuhin proposal.
Music does not unite us because it erases what distinguishes us.
It offers us the possibility to stay close without claiming to become identical.
Like the voices of an escape.
Like the tools of a quartet.
Like musicians who improvise and must continually decide whether to advance, respond or leave room.
And perhaps, at a time when each has a means to be heard, we should worry a little more about finding opportunities to listen.
On 1 October we will celebrate the International Music Day.
We will publish photos, share songs, remember composers and interpreters. Someone will organize concerts, others will dedicate a thought to the song that accompanied an important moment of his life.
All beautiful.
But we could do something less striking.
Listen to a music we wouldn't have chosen.
Ask someone what song you represent, and listen to it without interrupting it after thirty seconds.
Going to a concert of a kind we believe doesn't belong to us.
Or let a child make us feel what he is learning, even when the melody is still uncertain and the hand tires the right key.
Because the value of music is not only measured in the works performed.
There is also the moment when someone finds the courage to begin.
And another human being decides to listen to him.
Maybe music won't save the world.
It will not stop violence alone, it will not eliminate injustice, it will not prevent us from hurting each other.
But you can remember something that the noise of our days tends to make us forget.
That we are not the only voices of the score.
That the silence of the other is not always a void to fill.
That a dissonance does not necessarily require the destruction of one of the two notes.
And that there are forms of beauty to which we can only come together.
Perhaps this is today the deepest meaning of an International Music Day.
Do not celebrate a language that everyone already understands.
But to defend the possibility of continuing to learn from each other.
Menuhin imagined a city that, for a few minutes, stopped making noise.
Fifty-one years later, we could collect that proposal and give it an even wider meaning.
Maybe we don't need a world where everyone sings the same melody.
We need a world where no one should stop singing to allow others to exist.
And in which, before we raise our voice once again, we finally get the time to listen to someone else's.
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