Another summer rounds the curve towards the final stretch to the forthcoming fall, for this combo academic-performer the dividing line between one year and the next. Casting my thoughts forward by a few weeks, I’m starting to think about those of my new students for whom the notion of true hearing just might be a new concept. That’s less the case with my incoming charges at the SF Conservatory (although exceptions are bound to exist) and more with my new kids at UC Berkeley. They won’t be music majors, although there might be some potential such (at least music minors) in my classroom. They will be bright, motivated, intelligent young people who know all about studying and excelling in academic pursuits.
But most won’t know how to listen. For them music is something that accompanies other things. It’s something you party to, dance to, walk to, ride the bus to. But it isn’t something you actually listen to, something you focus on. And that’s where the challenge arises.
We live in a world soaked in music, most of it abysmally rotten, most of it ephemeral, most of it designed as enhancement to the other senses. Most pop music is at least as much visual as aural, if not more so: what makes Lady Gaga such a phenomenon if not the visuals? Physical attributes—either freakish or sexually enticing—are the name of the game in the pop music world. Image is the big concern of pop singers and their handlers. Image. Vision, not sound.The music itself runs towards the thoughtlessly conformist and the singers can’t really sing. Modern pitch-correcting software and the rest of the Pandora’s box of digital processing can make anyone into a convincing pop singer, just as a DAW and a folder full of pre-digested loops can make anyone into a songwriter. The lowest common demoninator has never been lower than now.
None of that will do for Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Brahms, and their ilk. Mozart’s music makes little sense as background wallpaper; it just becomes tinkly and bland, maybe even a little irritating. Only with full attention does the full measure of the music reveal itself. I have no doubt that there is some pop music that repays intensive listening as well, but in pop such are the exception rather than the rule. You don’t play the Bach B Minor Mass as background music for a cocktail party.
So I need to help them learn how to listen more effectively. Sometimes a roundabout approach can work wonders. For example, I’ve had us begin with a session of listening to the room itself: everybody sitting alertly but relaxed (try sitting upright without your back making contact with the chair) and spending about five minutes just focusing on the room: the air, the outside noises, each other’s breathing, the millions of tiny creaks and whatnots that surround us. Only then, in that heightened awareness, will I start a piece of music going. In such a situation, a Gregorian chant can seem downright sensuous, alien and wonderful and different. But only if you’re listening, only if you’re carefully attuned.
This particular point comes up sometimes amongst audiophiles in discussions cum debates cum arguments cum brawls about vinyl versus digital. One argument holds that the sheer bothersomeness of playing an LP—cleaning it, putting it on the turntable, cleaning the stylus, positioning the tonearm—enhances the listening experience by encouraging heightened awareness. There’s a point to that, but there’s nothing stopping you from performing a similar ritual with a CD or a computer-based music server. The act itself is secondary to the intention behind the act.
Intention. That’s the ticket. You must intend to listen carefully. That’s where a concert hall gets it so very right: the seats all facing the stage, the deliberate avoidance of distractions. The neutral lighting. The orchestra dressed in blacks and whites, nothing to involve the eye overly. Provided you’re not surrounded by gauche peasants or a gaggle of apparent tuberculars, a concert hall can be a superb environment for concentrating on music.
But there’s a lot to be said for the focused home concert hall. No gauche peasants or miscreants hacking up a quart of loogies during the slow movement. Easy access to the bathroom and to the refrigerator. More to the point, a home listening environment can be made into a kind of temple, a portable temple if you will, one that can come and go as living room/party room/listening shrine, as the moment requires. It isn’t so much the room or the equipment it contains, as it is the way we approach being in that room.
I know we can all become better listeners, without turning the process into a grim duty or an obnoxiously narcissistic self-improvement project. All we need is gentle persistence, setting some time out each day to re-connect with the miracle that is music.