Repeated listening

I've written before about the artificial stress our society often makes when it comes to music enjoyment. To summarize, we often think we should be able to understand everything about a piece of music on the first hearing. If we don't, then there is either something wrong with us, or with the music. I was thinking about this the other day while listening to Alfred Brendel playing the first movement of Schubert's Bb Sonata. This movement is almost fifteen minutes long, and I admit that when I first started listening to it I was somewhat loathe to spend that much time on one track. When listening to my iPod I liked shorter tracks, so the variety would keep me interested. But I've listened to this movement at least 11 times according to iTunes, much more if incomplete hearings and listening to the CD are added in. These repeated listenings have allowed me to memorize much of the work, so I could sing along while doing the dishes. I had a fabulous time, following the various shifts in motives, harmonies, keys, rhythms, and general characters. Fifteen minutes of doing the dishes had never passed so quickly. So it just took patience and effort in getting to know this piece that allowed me to enjoy it to such extent.

How to Listen

Kenneth Woods has a good post about learning to listen to music, including a great anecdote about listening to multiple recordings of the Enigma Variations.

However, when we got to Nimrod and the first major arrival of that movement, we both felt something big, something cosmic happen, like the grim reaper himself walking right over our graves, and the same thing happened in the finale- a big, cathartic “wow” moment that no other recording had been able to deliver or even really hint at. We both came away with the impression that this was the only conductor who both knew and could put accross what the “Enigma” in the variations was.

Once we’d hear the whole thing, we could both look back and as musicians and see what the conductor was up to- the approach seemed so logical seen from the reverse. By downplaying the episodic quality of the piece, he was able to intensify the overall, cumulative effect of the work where it counted most. What might have seemed at first a matter-of-fact approach to phrasing was in fact an intentionally un-sentimental one, and this is a piece that benefits from a certain stoicism.

Frankly, all the other performers we’d sampled sounded like students by comparison (and there were some very distinguished recordings in this category). I’m usually quick to defend interpreters who like to take note of the trees and to smell the flowers and gild the lilies, but the evidence here was clear that there was a big price to that approach- none of the others were able to make the whole piece arrive with anything like the same degree of power.

In previous years I've toyed with the idea of writing a book on listening to music, or to form a listening club at school. Either case would focus on the various ways to listen: performer-oriented, composer-oriented, local features, global features, timbre vs. melody vs. harmony vs. rhythm, intramusical referents, intermusical referents, and extramusical referents. The difficulty comes in portraying a rigor while acknowledging all of the different ways to experience music and avoiding grocery lists of events or features. Eric Clarke's Ways of Listening is a step forward in this topic, though very much from a cognitive view whereas Kenneth is approaching the topic from a performance/analysis perspective.