Nothing Special

Listen and look, I said. Listen, look, and absorb. There are no wrong answers. Everybody plays.

My students were encountering Haydn’s Symphony No. 43 in E-flat Major ‘Mercury’ for the first time. This being a relatively advanced class, I had gone quickly over the broad components of the first movement’s sonata-allegro form, and now it was time to knuckle down and really learn something about Haydn’s gold-medal craft. I went into careful detail about the first two phrases of the Primary theme, covering just about everything I considered worth covering. This being Haydn and not some schmuck, that meant a lot of covering.

Now it was my students’ turn with the third phrase. You each make an observation (audervation?) about this phrase. I don’t care how insightful (inhearful?) or not. Just make an observation. We’ll go around the room and each of you comes up with something.

So we went around the room, then again as they started getting the hang of it. No wrong answers, I said. Just come up with something. Bit by bit the observations started piling up, some obvious as all get-out, others requiring a bit more aural juice.

I wasn’t really all that concerned as to our eventual destination, although I had an overarching point to make about developing variation—the noble practice of generating musical materials out of seed ideas. That idea was secondary to my real goal, which was to encourage them to think, to risk, to contribute, and to ix-nay with all the orry-way about being wrong or right.

Which can require a quantum change in the thinking of your average college student, who is firmly enmeshed in unyielding notions of “right answer” and “wrong answer.” Typically the right answer is the professor’s. Our students are conditioned practically from birth to tell teachers what teachers want to hear. Say the secret word and collect $100, says Groucho. So students sit there quietly, hoping somebody will come up with the right answer when the professor throws out a challenge along the lines of: OK, here’s the first phrase of the Closing Theme. What’s going on here?? Speak to me.

It’s not as easy as it seems. Several students in the class began throwing out analytic statements—the E-flat at the end of the phrase might be picking up the E-flat from the previous phrase—and, while I of course accepted their input, I also pointed out that there’s a difference between making an observation and drawing a conclusion based on that observation. For now we were making observations. Eventually we’d get around to analyzing what it all meant.

Creatively engaged listening, in other words. Really hear the music. Really hear it, with your ears and senses, instead of relying on the eyeball-mind-ennui mindset of so many music students sloughing their way through a theory class. The music is lost in the analysis, lost in the forms, lost in the urlinie and the bassbrechung and the linear progressions and all the other impedimenta of Schenkerian theory. You can’t analyze what you can’t hear; you can’t come to conclusions about music you don’t know.

Yet mindful listening isn’t easy, just as mindful anything isn’t easy. Paradoxically, one’s attention needs to be relaxed yet alert in order for mindfulness to arise. A tense mind on the hunt for answers is not mindful; it is listening to itself and not the music. It’s a mind that is governed by a subtle form of greed—I want to get this right—instead of abiding in a conclusion-free zone that is able to notice and record without becoming enmeshed in comparisons and contrasts.

Perhaps the villain here, if I can point to something as crass as a villian in a cheap right-wrong scenario, is our tendency as teachers to encourage conclusions—hence exam performance, hence grades—instead of promoting the heightened sensitivity and perceptiveness that can come when the sensory barriers come down. We know all too well that corrosive attitude expressed by Will this be on the midterm? Students learn early on the advantages of proactive defensiveness.

Creative listening is nothing special, which is precisely why it is so difficult to achieve and why it is so risky to encourage. Hearing with absorption, with mindfulness, with clarity, but without mental frameworks that require the square peg to go into the square hole, even before we really know what the peg is, or the hole for that matter. Just listening. Then, when the time comes, to start making sense out of it all. That’s a tall order for a 2 hour class session. Still, we have to try.

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