How to Listen

[Dave2002]

Some years ago there was a book written with the title "How to Eat" - http://www.amazon.com/How-Eat-Pleasu.../dp/0471257508 which prompted some of us to come up with simple algorithms, such as 1. Pick up food 2. Open mouth. 3 Insert food. 4. Chew. 5 Swallow!

"How to Listen" might prompt similar comments.

However, I think it makes a difference what one is trying to listen to. I am currently listening to Scarlatti sonatas, and I find that I don't really know what I'm looking out for. Should I listen to them one a day - which would take over a year to get through them all, or gorge myself on ten or twenty to speed up the process?

The question suggested by considering "how to listen" need not only be applied to keyboard sonatas, but could be applied to many other genres of music - symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music.

An analogy might be that when going on a journey - or something fairly simple like a walk in the country - what should one be looking out for - or could one be watching out for? Points of interest? Landscape? Flora and fauna? Landmarks and buildings?

[MrGongGong]

http://www.ears.dmu.ac.uk/spip.php?rubrique201

Some interesting links in the bibliography

I don't really know what I'm looking out for

I usually use the flappy things on the sides of my head

and (again)

http://www.soundandmusic.org/projects/minute-listening

and

http://deeplistening.org/site/

and so on

[Serial_Apologist]

The music I find most listenable is, as I can't remember who wrote, music that surges, music that one feels just had to be composed, whether freely improvised or on to paper. Music where spontaneity and inspiration seem to come together. E.g. Schumann, Mahler, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. Remaining an incorrigeable Romantic in so many ways, I do my best to "bracket out" such things as being white, lower middle class, retired and of a certain generation, while still allowing inelucible associations such as landscape and influential others' tastes to railroad most of my preferences.

[vinteuil]

I am currently listening to Scarlatti sonatas, and I find that I don't really know what I'm looking out for. Should I listen to them one a day - which would take over a year to get through them all, or gorge myself on ten or twenty to speed up the process?

... I don't think you shd start by "looking out" for anything.

Scarlatti is one of my very favourite composers. I have listened to him in quantity over the last fifty years, and have tried to play many of his sonatas. The playing of them is great fun, and probably influences subsequent listening.

If I had any pointers to make for Scarlatti, it wd might be not to start by taking him too "seriously". I think he's a great composer, but that doesn't mean you need to treat him with a heavy approach - no more than you would, say, Haydn. And to be responsive to the obsessive nature of his music - he will take a tiny formulaic shape and repeat it and twist it and then stop and then repeat it and twist it. And again. He will surprise you - that is part of the fun - but he will test you by his need to scratch away at an itch to an apparently absurd extent. But it all "makes sense". Repeated listening pays dividends. Enjoy! - or indeed, as he himself said : “Vivi felice.” Live happily. The final words of the preface to the only collection of Scarlatti’s pieces for keyboard instrument published during his lifetime....





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[Dave2002]

Possibly this article by Aaron Copland might push us on further - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1.../preview?pli=1

[kernelbogey]

Some years ago there was a book written with the title "How to Eat" - http://www.amazon.com/How-Eat-Pleasu.../dp/0471257508 which prompted some of us to come up with simple algorithms, such as 1. Pick up food 2. Open mouth. 3 Insert food. 4. Chew. 5 Swallow!

"How to Listen" might prompt similar comments.[...] An analogy might be that when going on a journey - or something fairly simple like a walk in the country - what should one be looking out for - or could one be watching out for? Points of interest? Landscape? Flora and fauna? Landmarks and buildings?

Taking the question at its most general level - not going into the level of detail of the (interesting) Scarlatti comments - there is the question of focus: whether on the scenery on a walk in the country, the taste of food or the particular sound of specific music.

Much of the time, without awareness, we are on 'automatic pilot', not fully paying attention to what we are experiencing. How common is the experience of driving somewhere on a familiar route (from home to work, say) and suddenly 'waking up' and wondering whether the last traffic light was indeed at green, or even how, exactly, one has got to this particular place.

So, when eating, we are often doing something else such as chatting, watching tv or reading the paper at the same time. Young people today are adept at multi-tasking in this way, sometimes listening to music, emailing and texting 'simultaneously'. If we're eating and doing something else, we're not usually experiencing the taste and texture of the food. (An illuminating experiment is to eat something and focus totally and exclusively on the sensations in the mouth.) So 'How to eat' is not such a dotty idea as it might at first seem.

Much of my music 'listening' is done while doing something else, though I'd say (defensively) that it's a bit more than 'background music' for me.

But to sit, as in a concert hall, at home and devote my whole attention to the music is a quite different experience. I sense, from postings, that many boarders here do a great deal of such totally focused listening, and I often find myself in awe of the learnedness that is consequently exhibited in posts (eg Vinteuil no 4 above).

One can then focus on melody, harmony, sound quality, performance etc etc at will; or on the whole musical experience: much as, on a country walk, one can focus on particular sights, sounds, scents etc. We have a supreme capacity for switching focus, but mostly we do so without being aware of what we are focusing on or how we shift our focus.