Making music
In other cultures, there's less distinction between playing and listening
Mark Wigglesworth 2:57pm GMT 29th October 2010
In western classical music, lines drawn between performers and listeners are getting stronger and stronger, with players becoming ever more specialised and audiences increasingly self-deprecating about their own musical abilities. A hundred years ago, music lovers would have been asked what instrument they played whereas now a question is far more likely to be about what they have on their iPod. In other cultures the distinction between playing and listening is much vaguer. Indeed many societies would find the idea that anyone is 'unmusical' absurd. Music, like language, is seen to be something that everyone participates in and to say someone is unmusical is like saying they can't speak. In fact to be 'tone-deaf' is an incredibly rare clinical condition. We are almost all 'musical', and whether playing or listening, music's experience is all one. After all, music only really exists when someone hears it.
Nowadays we are exposed to more music than ever and it's becoming so ubiquitous that we've understandably developed the ability to shut it out. But the more we hear music passively, the harder it becomes to listen to it actively and the risk of being able to mute music like this is that we might not be able to find the button to switch it on again.
The more actively involved with music we are, the greater its rewards. We're not going to go back to the days when families would spend their evenings singing round the piano but by going to a live concert, our 'participation' in the performance can be an act of music making that is almost as powerful. Audiences are as much part of the occasion as the musicians in the orchestra. The ring of a mobile phone or an ill-timed coughing fit has ruined more performances than a fluffed horn solo. In that sense we are all 'performers'.
When listening to music we connect with the composer, we connect with the players, and we connect with something within ourselves. But by going to a concert, we're also able to connect with each other. Notwithstanding the frustrations of some people's listening habits, the group dynamic created by a concert is unattainable by music on its own. The energy in the air that a performance gives out is something that everyone in the hall breaths in. And it is that air that sustains us long after the music's final strains have died away. No man is an island. But should we ever discover ourselves to be one, music offers one of the easiest bridges to cross. Its ability to invisibly connect us can be relied on far more than the world wide web. I believe the ultimate power of music lies not in the communication between the composer and the listener but in the connection that is formed between all who experience it, across continents of space and through generations of time. It binds us together whether we are playing or listening. Indeed it makes no such distinction between the two.
Comments
By chance I recently came across the tail end of a free lunchtime concert by the a local Contemporary Music Ensemble. They were playing Terry Riley's "In C" and for one of the few times in my life I was able to connect with a mimimalist. Watching it live made all the difference, the subtle and gradual changes in timbre far more apparent than on record (perhaps because you could actually see players pick up their instruments). Plus, I was able to convince myself, probably wrongly, that even I could play this stuff.
Your point about passive listening seems to me to be a separate, though very important, one. It's a habit that's morphed from a guilty secret - we all occasionally fiddle with a crossword or do the washing up while listening - to the standard mode of experiencing music. My son and his friends admit they never, ever, actually sit and listen. Music only ever forms a background to some other activity. Sad, when you realize that even minimalist music rewards a degree of concentration.
I attended my first concert as a teenager. It completely changed my life. The music lifted me out of myself (something I desperately needed at that point in my life). From that moment I was compelled to become a musician. Mid-teens is rather late to start, but I worked very hard and achieved my goal. I played with some of the world's finest orchestras and conductors only to discover that playing and listening were almost completely different.
I believe professional musicians get their "high" from, first and foremost, exercising their skill as musicians, and, only secondarily, from the music itself. Musicians are the channel through which the inspiration in music reaches the listener. I'll admit to feeling uplifted after performing a Bruckner symphony, or the Verdi Requiem, for instance, but for me it was a big disappointment that I could not, as a performer, experience the same incredible high from the music as I could, and still do, as a listener.
Mark, I couldn't agree with you more. It is a pity though that the gap between musicians and audience is so large. I don't know of performing groups that try to involve the audience in the performance itself, though I do appreciate the insights events/talks that many have that talk about the music and at least prepare the audience for what they are about to hear.
This is surely something for performing groups to think about, especially if they want to attract young people to classical music!