When was the last time you listened to some music? No, I mean really listened?
We live in a world that teaches people to ignore music. Walk through any High Street, supermarket or shopping mall and chances are your ears will be assaulted with an unrelenting barrage of 'background' music.
Go for a cup of coffee, eat in a restaurant or have a drink in the pub and chances are you'll be provided with 'mood' music to enhance the 'ambience' of the occasion. White-washing the world with music is a pervasive, invasive modern folly which reduces an art form to mere decoration. Worse still, is that jazz, perhaps more than many other kinds of music, demands close listening if it is be appreciated fully.
Appreciating a jazz solo is all about recognising variation and subtlety. Without close listening, bereft of a familiar melody, even a great jazz solo just becomes noise - an endless stream of eighth notes spiralling up and down, relating to nothing and going nowhere. To be appreciated, jazz needs to be listened to mindfully. The listener needs to focus attention on the intricacies of the solo line, listening to how it informs, and is informed by what the rhythm section is playing and how everything relates to the structure of the original tune.
This sounds complicated and yet all it really requires is that the listener gives the music his full attention rather than letting it flow over him whilst his mind is occupied with other things. Jazz cannot be absorbed by osmosis. Of course, we musicians may nod in agreement with these points and not realise that we too are guilty of having our ears closed for the vast majority of the time. When was the last time you walked around with jazz on your iPod, or had it playing on your car stereo? When was the last time you put on a CD whilst you were cooking dinnner? Perhaps you're even listening to iTunes or Spotify while you're reading this blog.
There's nothing wrong with doing these things from time to time, after all the subconscious mind is a powerful thing and there may be benefits to be gained from simply being surrounded by music. However, I am certain that it is also important to take time to listen to music with our ears open and our attention fully committed. As a demonstration of how easy it is to close our ears, try opening them now and listening to the sounds around you that you have been ignoring up to this point. This is what happens when I open mine. I can hear the fan in my desktop whirring and the clicking and clacking of the keys as I type. Outside, a car revs wildly as it struggles though today's icy conditions...a dog barks twice in the distance...traffic from the main road hums indistinguishably in the background at a lower pitch than the computer fan. Drops of melting snow, maybe only one every minute or so, patter onto the windowsills and balcony of my flat from the higher parts of the building...
It is very quiet here at the moment and yet there was a world of sound that I was simply phasing out without even being aware of it. It was only when I chose to focus consciously on that world that I began to hear it properly. Unfortunately, in the modern world, this kind of filtering is absolutely necessary or we would be overwhelmed by the amount of sound that we're exposed to in our towns and cities. The background noise, including music, seems to get ever louder as time goes on.
In consequence, we're becoming more and more adept at filtering sounds out and stopping our attention from being aurally arrested. In other words, we're becoming better at ignoring sound, and ignoring music. However, if we want to learn to play music, it is vital that we are able to engage fully with music; to listen with full attention and fully open ears. If we cannot do this, how can we expect to hear accurately that which we wish to play? Listening, really listening is a musical skill that can be learned like any other. So today, why not set aside some time, even if it's only three minutes or so, to listen to a piece of music? After all, as Igor Stravinsky put it:
"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
http://playjazz.blog.co.uk/2010/01/07/the-art-of-listening-7708186/
0 Comments:
Post a Comment