On learning languages through music — and why I keep returning to the recordings of an earlier era.
There is a thing about me that people who know me well eventually notice, and it has occasionally been remarked upon by people who do not know me well but have happened to glance at what I was listening to: I prefer the old songs. The recordings I return to most often, in any languages, are not the contemporary ones. They are the ones made decades ago, by performers whose names belong to a particular period of recorded music, in arrangements that do not sound like anything currently being produced, with vocal styles that the modern ear sometimes finds slow.
I do not know exactly why this is. There are influences I can identify in retrospect — my father, who kept the Los Panchos cassette that began my Spanish; my own slightly bookish disposition that attaches itself to the past more readily than to the present; the simple fact that the old songs of any language tend to use the language more carefully than the new ones, with greater respect for the syntax and the rhythm and the weight that a well-placed word can carry. But the truth is that I gravitated toward older music in nearly every language I have learned long before I had any theory about why, and I notice now that this gravitation has shaped my relationship with each of those languages in ways the alternative would not have produced.
This piece is about what particular songs I have listened to and what these songs have done for my language learning.
For Spanish, it has been the bolero. Los Panchos most centrally, but also Javier Solís, Trío Los Tres Reyes, and — in a later generation — Luis Miguel, the long line of interpreters of a tradition that emerged in Cuba in the late nineteenth century, traveled to Mexico, was perfected in the recording studios of the 1940s and 1950s, and became one of the genuine artistic achievements of the Spanish-speaking world.
The bolero is a slow form. It does not hurry. The vocals sit forward in the mix, the guitars provide the architecture, the harmonies — when there are harmonies — give the song a fullness that a single voice cannot produce. The lyrics are typically about love, but love treated seriously rather than casually, love as something that costs the lover something significant, love as the kind of subject that warrants careful attention. Tú me acostumbraste a todas esas cosas. Y tú me enseñaste, que son maravillosas. You accustomed me to all those things. And you taught me they were marvelous. The verb conjugations alone, in a song like that, will teach you more about the past tense of acostumbrar and enseñar than any grammar exercise will. But the more important learning is something else. It is the learning of register — of what kind of language is appropriate to what kind of feeling, of how a serious emotion sounds in Spanish when it is being expressed by people who take both the emotion and the language seriously.
I have listened to bolero for nearly as long as I have been studying Spanish. The two have been entangled from the beginning. And I find, when I notice it, that my own Spanish has been shaped by the bolero — not in any way I could describe technically, but in some quality of attention to the language, some willingness to slow down with it, some inclination to treat it as a thing capable of carrying weight. The bolero gave me that. The contemporary Spanish music I have heard, which I do not dislike but do not return to as often, would not have given it to me in the same form.
For French, the names are Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, and Serge Gainsbourg.
Piaf is the obvious one — the voice that, more than any other, taught me what French could do at its most concentrated. Her recordings have a quality that I am not sure exists in modern popular music in any language: a complete absence of irony, a willingness to mean every word as if the meaning of the word and the meaning of her life were the same thing. Non, je ne regrette rien. No, I regret nothing. When she sings it, you believe it, and you believe it not because she has performed regretlessness convincingly but because she has lived in such a way that the regretlessness is real. The French of her songs is the French of someone who treats the language as adequate to the most serious things she has to say. That is rare in any era. It was particularly available in hers.
Aznavour is the songwriter — the craftsman, the one whose discography reveals an intelligence about love and aging and ordinary human disappointment that I find more rewarding the longer I know it. Hier encore j'avais vingt ans. Yesterday I was still twenty. The grammatical construction alone — the imperfect tense doing the work of nostalgia — is its own small lesson in what French can do that English cannot do quite the same way. But the more important thing about Aznavour is that he wrote about ordinary subjects with extraordinary attention. Old age. The end of a love affair. The failure to become what one had hoped to become. He wrote in a French that was clear and precise and never showy, and the songs taught me, slowly, what kind of French I wanted to inhabit when I had enough French to choose.
Gainsbourg is the third — the most controversial of the three, the most stylistically restless, the one whose work I came to last and have come to appreciate most slowly. There is a complexity in Gainsbourg that the other two do not have. He was a real intellectual operating in popular music, drawing on jazz and chanson and rock and reggae across his career, writing lyrics that had genuine literary ambition. Some of his songs I love. Some I do not particularly want to listen to. But the ones I love I have listened to a great many times, and I have learned from them a kind of French that is different from Piaf's and Aznavour's — more ironic, more layered, more willing to use the language for purposes other than direct expression. The three of them together gave me access to a range of French that the music of any single performer would not have given me.
Italian is a more recent love than the others, and the singer who has accompanied that interest most often is Mina Mazzini.
I have not pursued Italian seriously. I would not claim any real competence in the language. But it is a language I have listened to with some pleasure over the years, and Mina is the voice I have returned to most. Her singing has a quality that I find difficult to describe except by negation: it is not theatrical, though it is operatic; it is not detached, though it is restrained; it is not cold, though it does not perform warmth. She sings the Italian language with such command that you can hear, in the way she shapes the vowels and chooses the pauses, what Italian sounds like when it is being used by someone who has absolute control of it.
Se telefonando io potessi dirti addio. If, by telephoning, I could tell you goodbye. The conditional tense, the awkward conjunctive telefonando, the implied tenderness in addio — Mina makes these elements feel not just clear but inevitable, as if the song could only have been written this way. I have learned almost no formal Italian. But I have listened to Mina enough to develop, at a level below technique, some sense of what the language sounds like when it is well used. That is its own modest form of learning.
Arabic is the language I have engaged with longest in some respects and least in others. The Quranic Arabic of my childhood was the deepest early presence — the recitation of the daily prayers, the slow accumulation of phonological intimacy with a language whose meanings were initially only partially clear to me. The classical Arabic of the Quran is not the Arabic of contemporary speech, of course, but it is the Arabic that prepared the ear for everything that followed.
What followed, for me, has been almost entirely through music. Two singers above all: Abdel Halim Hafez and Fairuz.
Abdel Halim Hafez, the great Egyptian voice of the mid-twentieth century, was known across the Arab world simply as El-Andaleeb El-Asmar — the Dark Nightingale. He sang in a tradition that does not have a real Western equivalent. His songs, like those of his contemporaries in the classical Egyptian tradition, could last twenty or thirty minutes. The orchestra would respond to his interpretation as he sang. The audience would respond to the orchestra. The whole performance would build, over its long duration, into something that the studio recordings can only partially capture. Ahwak. I love you. The phrase sits at the heart of one of his most famous songs, returning across the song with subtle variations of feeling. Listening to him is, among other things, an education in how Arabic works rhythmically — how the language's sounds and stresses create a music that the language itself, in spoken form, only partly suggests. His voice carries a particular quality of restrained emotion, of feeling that is genuine without being performed, that has shaped my relationship with the language at a level I could not easily articulate.
Fairuz, the Lebanese singer who is still living and still singing, occupies a different position in the Arabic-speaking imagination. Her voice is purer, less ornamented, less rooted in the elaborate classical tradition. Her songs are often shorter, often more accessible, often about gentler subjects — landscapes, mornings, simple longings. She has been the soundtrack to mornings in much of the Arab world for decades. Habbeitak bi-saif. Habbeitak bi-shitee. I loved you in summer. I loved you in winter. The phrasing is direct in a way Abdel Halim's is not, and the directness has its own beauty. Together, the two of them have given me an entire emotional and linguistic range in Arabic that I would not have access to without them. I cannot read a contemporary Arabic newspaper with full comprehension. But I can listen to Abdel Halim Hafez and Fairuz and understand, in a way that goes deeper than vocabulary, what the language sounds like at its most considered.
What I notice, when I look at the singers I have named, is that they share something. They are old. The recordings are mostly from before I was born, or from when I was very young. The traditions they belong to are traditions that have evolved past them in some respects, that the contemporary cultures of Spain and Mexico and France and Italy and Egypt and Lebanon have moved on from. There are extraordinary contemporary musicians in all of these languages, and I am not arguing against listening to them. But the older recordings have a particular quality that I keep returning to.
What is that quality? I have thought about this for a long time, and the closest I can come to naming it is something like patience. The old songs were made in eras when popular music had the time to be careful — when a vocalist could shape a phrase without rushing, when an arrangement could breathe, when a lyric could trust the listener to follow it without needing to repeat the hook every fifteen seconds. The recording infrastructure was simpler. The attention spans of the audiences were, in some respects, longer. What this produced was music that uses language more carefully than most of what is currently being produced.
For someone learning a language, this matters. The older recordings are easier to hear, in the sense that the words are more carefully enunciated and the phrasing leaves space around the words. But the older recordings also, more importantly, model a relationship to the language that is itself worth absorbing — the unhurried, attentive, respectful relationship that good vocalists in any era have had to the languages they have sung in.
I am not nostalgic for these eras as eras. The mid-twentieth century was, in most respects, worse than the present. The political situations these singers worked under were often dire. The personal lives of many of them were difficult. I have no fantasy of having lived in their time. But what they made remains — preserved on recordings that I can listen to as easily today as I could have listened to them on the day they were released — and what they made teaches a kind of attention to language that I have found enormously valuable in my own ongoing relationship with the languages I am learning.
There is a smaller observation I want to add to this, because it has come up in my own listening enough times that it seems worth naming.
The languages I have engaged with most through music are the languages whose music I have engaged with the most. Spanish I have been listening to for decades, and Spanish is the language I have come closest to comfort in. French is second, and I have listened to French music seriously for a long time. Italian I have engaged with much less, and my Italian remains modest. Arabic I engage with through the songs of two specific singers, mostly, and my Arabic outside of those particular registers is correspondingly limited.
This is not a coincidence. Music is a slow form of language acquisition. It does not work quickly. You cannot listen to a singer for six months and expect to have absorbed much of the language they are singing in. But you can listen to a singer for twenty years, with genuine attention, and find that you have absorbed something the formal study would not have given you in the same form — the texture of the language, the way it sounds when it is being used by someone who has command of it, the musicality of its phonology and its grammar and its emotional register.
Songs are not a substitute for grammar books and tutoring sessions and reading and writing. But they are a complement that the language lover of a slightly bookish disposition neglects at the cost of a certain richness in their relationship to the language. The languages I love best are the languages whose music I have loved longest — and that is no accident, but a consequence of the kind of attention that loving someone's singing demands.
The old songs are still here. They will outlast all of us. The recordings made in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s in any of these languages are easier to hear today than they were when they were made — clearer, more accessible, more universally available. There is no good reason not to listen to them. There is every reason to do so.
I plan to keep listening. The old songs taught me Spanish as much as my tutors did. They taught me French as much as my classes did. They have taught me whatever Italian and Arabic I have. And they will, I expect, continue to teach me, for as long as I am able to hear them.
— A.C. Maas