MacDowell Dispatch #3: Listening

I have been thinking about how I do not like program notes. Perhaps I should clarify. I like reading about the music I am listening to, but just not right before I listen. I could see a tradition of receiving the program notes after the performance, on my way out the door, so that I can continue to develop an understanding of the music I've just heard. But as an immediate complement to the listening experience, I am less interested. I want to avoid channeling my intellect just before a musical experience. Program notes, whether technical or narrative, ask the listener to keep our mind on the intellectual aspects mentioned during the musical experience. This keeps the mind in the thinking state and out of the feeling, sensing state. There is something to be said for a classical music event as a communal experience where people are being immersed in the music, without the intellectual scaffolding.

Of course, performers and composers require deep literacy and facility with concert music. And music literacy does not hinder an experience. But what is the end goal? It is probably every composer and performer's desire that concert music is a deeply felt experience. How do we cultivate the sensing and feeling aspects of listening? They don't compete with an intellectual experience, but they operate differently and require their own kind of cultivation. 

I think the primary difference in how we feel and sense music versus how we intellectualize it has to do with time. When we feel or sense music, we are listening 'in time'. We are allowing it to affect us as it continues forward, perhaps remembering returns, anticipating articulative moments, but simply allowing it to take us. Contrast this to an intellectual experience where we are evaluating the music as it passes through us. Listening with sense and feeling, as opposed to intellect, is not 'anti-intellectual'. Far from it. Rather, these ways of listening exist as complements to each other. And we don't want to confuse non-intellectual ways of listening as anti-intellectual. As we explore these modes, we begin to find what they offer, both in challenges and opportunities. 

We know the opportunities involved in intellectual listening. This kind of listening invites comparisons and judgement, so we can decide how a listening experience compares with previous ones and make other discerning evaluations on the performance. Depending on one's abilities, intellectual listening can reveal formal and technical aspects of a piece. Technical features can be tremendously satisfying to uncover and it can be just as satisfying to realize what technical aspects of a work serve to create moments of fascination, intrigue or great emotional payoff. Conversely, intellectual listening can run the risk of taking us out of the moment. With too much discernment at work, we can judge a work in so many ways that we take ourselves out of the temporal experience. Do we like it? Is it being played well? Is it a better piece than the last one we heard? All these evaluations occur a step removed from the flow of music. Intellectual listening also runs the risk of insulating us from other kinds of listening, because it can begin to judge the alternatives. Ever critical, it is sizing up both the music and the listener. And if we do not challenge ourselves to listen always more deeply with the intellect, our powers of evaluation become limited to only what we have become familiar with. This kind of listening can lull itself into a false yet often confident sense of knowing. 

Listening with sense and feeling is a way of listening that suspends judgement. It is a way of being ever-present and 'in the moment' with a piece as it is being performed. In many ways it is akin to psychological time, but since the music is affecting the sway of the emotional and sensing mind, there is a way in which we are not daydreaming as much as participating in the dream of the music. The music guides the dream and for the duration of the music, our sense of time is arrested. This is such a fascinating way to listen, and I can't claim to be able to channel it on command, but I'm sure many of us can relate to this feeling. 

Often, we can remember these times vividly because they are so impactful. I remember sitting in a library listening room in Tucson, Arizona playing the Debussy cello sonata on a record. I remember the needle touching the record, I can recall the shape of the room and other small details that otherwise would have vanished from my mind like any other day before or since. The work was so foreign to me, I'm sure I was not listening in an intellectual way. The power of the music and my particular receptivity to it combined to create a perfect musical experience. It is etched in my memory as a moment when time stood still. 

I can't begin to understand the physiological impact of listening to music as a mode of vibrations touching the body. But this is another way by which music suspends our sense of time. And I can imagine that this effect that music has on us is also a way in which it is accessing our feelings. While we typically think of thoughts producing feelings, in music, it seems another mental operation is at work where feelings can arise with no thoughts attached. Perhaps this is a way in which music is able to circumvent the intellect, allowing us to listen in feeling and sensing modes. I don't want to argue that listening with the intellect is bad. Far from it. But it is a way of approaching music that has the potential to take us out of the moment. Perhaps sensing and feeling music can also take us far from the music's message – beyond a daydream and into a mode of simply being checked out. It's certainly worth exploring these modes and seeing what they offer. But to get into them, you might have to skip the program note.