#44 - Are You a Good (Music) Listener?
Hello,
This edition, long due after a 2.5 months' break, is about good listening. How do you know you are doing a good job listening? What do great listeners do that makes us feel so alive and happy in their company? How can music help you become a better listener?
How do you know you know you are doing a good job listening?
“ ‘How do you know you are doing a good job of listening?’ is one of the best questions to measure empathy. (…) The answer spontaneously given only by highly empathetic people is ‘When the other person keeps talking’ - the empath instinctively leans into the other person’s words.”
- Marcus Buckingham, “Love + Work”
Alain de Botton expands on the qualities and skills of a good listener:
“Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting life skills anyone can have. Yet few of us know how to do it, not because we are evil but because no one has taught us how and - related point - few have listened sufficiently well to us. So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to meet others but reluctant to hear them. Friendship degenerates into a socialized egoism (…)
There is a range of things that good listener is doing that makes it so nice to spend time in their company, Without necessarily quite realizing it, we’re often propelled into a conversation by something that feels both urgent and somehow undefined (…)
The good listener knows that we’d ideally move - via conversation with another person - from a confused, agitated state of mind to one that was more focused and (hopefully) more serene. The good listener is bringing to listening an ambition to clear up underlying issues (…)
The good listener is, paradoxically, a skillful interrupter. But they don’t as most people do, interrupt to intrude their own ideas; they interrupt to help the other get back to their original, more sincere yet elusive concern (…)
The good listener doesn’t moralize. They know their own minds well enough not to be surprised or frightened by strangeness. Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than being appalled by.
When we are in the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful pleasure, but too often we don’t really realize what it is about what this person is doing that is so welcome. Listening deserves discovery as one of the keys to good meals, late evenings - and good societies more broadly”
Source: “The School of Life: an Emotional Education”
How can music help you become a better listener?
“Music can be really alive when there are listeners who are really alive. To listen intently, to listen consciously, to listen with one’s whole intelligence is the least we can do in the furtherance of an art that is one of the glories of mankind.”
These are the final sentences of the book “What to Listen For in Music”. Written by the American composer Aaron Copland 85 years ago, and reedited in 1957, it has not taken any wrinkle. This book is a wonderful companion for a classical music lover. In a friendly, accessible, yet not over-simplistic way, the author step by step unfolds the fundamentals of the craft of music, so that we can become better listeners. Read this book while actually listening to music - there is a playlist at the end of each chapter.
Book Summary + Source: “What to Listen For in Music”
Two more books that I love and that can enrich your listening experience:
“Musical meaning is vague, mutable, and, in the end, deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.” This book provides a rich, exciting, and sometimes turbulent context around the musical masterpieces of the 20th century. Your listening will never be the same.
Book: “The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century”, by Alex Ross
“As Duke Ellington once said: “There are simply two kinds of music, good music, and the other kind.” In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to “good” music transcends questions of genre.
Like love, there can never be too much “good music”. The number of people who use it as a fuel to recharge their appetite for life is beyond counting.”
Book: “Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa”, by Haruki Murakami
For all its turbulence, April was the month of sheer musical delight with two exceptional musicians visiting Singapore: Ray CHEN, a discovery for me, and Khatia BUNIATISHVILI, one of my favorite pianists.
Be good listeners,
Arina