Listening, as opposed to mere hearing, is a core skill of musicians of all sorts and I have talked about the concept of active listening before on this blog. But I think it is worth taking up again as it has many facets.
"Active" listening implies intense focus, the selection of different perspectives and the sorting out and evaluating of what you are hearing. A great deal of music education, especially at the college and university level, is intended to cultivate and develop those skills necessary to be an active listener. It is essential whether you are a performer, a theorist, a musicologist or music historian and especially if you are a composer. But each of these different roles or modes needs a slightly different kind of active listening.
For example, a performer learns to attune themselves to the character of the music: harmonic, melodic and rhythmic, in order to activate, "bring to life" these aspects of the music so that their performance is more than mere mechanical reproduction. The use of active listening in your practice sessions involves perhaps isolating different melodic lines, taking the bass separately, doing a harmonic reduction so you can just listen to the chord progression, examining (by that I mean playing) the various rhythmic motifs and their relationship and so on.
The methods of theorists and historians move to a more abstract level and try to answer different questions (though every performer might need to use these methods as well to understand the music they are playing). What is the structure of the composition and how is that unfolded? What are the historic predecessors and influences? What was the characteristic performance style of the historic period and so on.
A composer might listen in all these ways but as well might take more of an aesthetic view: what is the music trying to communicate? What methods is the composer using? Perhaps even, what interesting devices might I want to steal? Oops, I mean borrow and cleverly disguise!
I was just re-reading the introduction to a collection of the Platonic Dialogues and found an interesting parallel. Plato did not publish any treatises or dissertations in his own "voice" as a philosopher. Everything we have from him (with the exception of a few letters, some spurious) is in the form of a dialogue between different characters, historic or anonymous. This was, then and now, rather a radical approach, because Plato is saying, more or less, that he does not have for us a complete and finished philosophical system, but merely invites us to take up certain questions about truth, morality, justice and so on and examine them. In many of the dialogues no final answer is found. The leading character of most of the dialogues is Socrates, Plato's teacher, whose central assertion is that he himself does not know the "Truth" but is always in search of it. Philosophy, rightly considered, is not a collection of "truths" or facts, but rather an activity in which one seeks out truths and, most of all, examines one's own ideas critically.
This feels very much like active listening to me. Instead of passively imbibing music, allowing it to wash over one or just to inspire intimate moods and feelings, one pursues music. engages it, takes it apart to see how it works and so on.
I think even ordinary listeners can expand their enjoyment of music enormously by taking up the practice of active listening.
Choosing a suitable envoi for this is a bit tricky. I am looking forward to hearing Daniil Trifonov play the Art of Fugue by Bach at Salzburg next month because I am very interested to hear how he engages this profound work, which has such great room for a really active performer. In that spirit, here is Trifonov playing the Brahms arrangement of the Bach Chaconne for piano, left hand. Brahms is actively engaging Bach in this version and then we have Trifonov engaging both of them...
No comments:
Post a Comment