It’s an astonishing work rate that has surely taken its toll. Arthritis means that Dylan can no longer hold a guitar; onstage he plays, and is propped up by, an electric piano. His voice – rarely a thing of beauty and most often an abrasively compelling affair described by David Bowie as “like sand and glue” – is in tatters, obliging him to abandon singing altogether for gravelly, dramatic declamation on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yet like Matisse, forced to give up oils and canvas for cut-outs around the same age, Dylan remains obstinately true to his art, “refusing to let his career become embalmed” as Paul Morley puts it in his new book, out next month. Once you stop creating, you’re in the past.

If classical music wants to reach a wider audience it must first understand that new audience. That new audience is more likely to be found at the fringes of classical music - among Ludovico Einaudi and André Rieu fans for instance - than among devotees of death metal and dubstep. (A sobering observation by a reader about André Rieu should be compulsory reading for all critics - follow this link to read it.) Critics, and, indeed, the whole classical fraternity, could learn much from studying the Compassionate Listening Project*. Members of this non-profit project have trained themselves in deep listening, which is something the visionary Pauline Oliveros advocated. This involves listening with care, attention, and deep compassion to every side of a difficult situation, with the goal of transforming separation and conflict into an opportunity for connection.

When I was working at the museum, I remember noticing something. They have this Buchla 100 modular system and I had two oscillators set in tune; I was just listening to them drift in and out of one another. For a while I didn’t understand what was happening; I didn’t realize that the oscillators were actually going out of tune, but it was a very interesting experience. Then, the next day, I went to play an acoustic organ and I was just sitting there holding an octave – basically two oscillators tuned in unison – and listening to it do the same thing, fluctuating. It was really an important discovery for me that the two were linked and that was what I was interested in, these instabilities that only certain instruments have.

Here’s the odd thing—26 years on, he hasn’t stopped. He’s been playing about 100 shows annually ever since, growling through a set of songs old and new with a small band. It’s an endeavor that for a good chunk of each year keeps him on a private bus and, in the U.S. at least, in relatively crummy hotel and motel rooms. (He’s said to prefer places that have windows that open and allow him to sleep with his pet mastiffs. Beyond that, they are places fans wouldn’t expect to find him.) The shows at first may have been a tonic, but over time they revealed themselves to be a panacea. It must have struck Dylan: How could he look foolish if he just kept doing the same thing? If he were an artist, he would continue to create and show his art publicly. If he were a celebrity, he would appear in public. And if he were a seer, a prophet, or even a god, well, he would let folks pay and see for themselves how mortal such figures actually were. And far from saturating the market, he has created a new industry for himself as a touring artist. On a good night he makes some of his best-known songs unrecognizable, and on a bad one you come out wondering what it was, exactly, you’ve just seen. So far this year, the 73-year-old has played in Japan (17 shows), Hawaii (two), Ireland, Turkey, and nearly 20 other cities in the hinterlands of Europe; he’s headed now to more than a dozen shows in eight different cities in Australia and New Zealand—and this is before what should be a fall run through the States. Robert Shelton, the New York Times writer who first noticed Dylan, labored on a biography for more than 20 years; seeing the star’s unstable arc on its publication in 1986, he titled it, grandly, No Direction Home. Dylan hadn’t even begun not to go home.

“I remember that when I worked on the Buchla at NYU for Chry-Ptus there were those sounds that I got by feedback, which I tried to find again with the synthesizer,” she recalled in an interview with Emmanuel Holterbach. “Beatings, pulsations, sustained sounds that evolved by beats, a kind of transposition of the re-injection procedure. It’s just that with the Buchla you could control things much more rigorously and it was I myself who made them move. At the same time I also kept the system of two tapes, which could play with a different synchronization. I kept that principle of mobility. It is improvising by itself all the time. In some way it is improvising itself.”