Katy Hamilton

In the immortal words of Dr. Frasier Crane, ‘I’m listening’.  Not to the mildly psychotic residents of Seattle, I hasten to add, but to a great many recordings – for most of the last week, I have been preparing for a slot on Radio 3’s ‘Building a Library’, to be broadcast next month. And what a fascinating week it’s been. A boxload of CDs, each featuring Brahms’s Cello Sonata no.2 in F major, Op.99, has been sitting next to my desk whilst I listen, annotate scores, make notes, read sleeve details, and fiddle with my metronome. Don’t worry, I’m not about to reveal any spoilers about the show. But it’s got me thinking a lot about listening, kinds of listening, and how willing we are (or should be) to open our ears.

There is no shortage, in modern Britain, of things to listen to. Passing buses and planes; gossiping friends sitting across from you in the restaurant; winged insects buzzing next to ice cream vans; tinny thudding from the earpieces of fellow commuters; background music in shops and restaurants and even banks. (Why you should need music in banks is a thing I find utterly mysterious, but there you are.) If you can successfully block out all of that, it might be because you yourself are sporting noise reduction headphones as you make your way to and from work. We listen to a lot, every day, and the aural feed is pretty much constant.

But how do we listen? And why? I would say that most of us, most of the time, are fairly lazy listeners. If music is happening somewhere around us, it is probably either not meant to be listened to intensively (background music in the shop) or something that we have chosen to put on as an accompaniment, or distraction, from current circumstances – the boring bus ride to work, the motorway rush as you drive to visit family, the sense of ‘company’ it provides as you stand alone in your kitchen cooking, or doing the washing up, or the ironing.  None of these scenarios tend to prompt very active engagement, and if we do end up focusing on the music, we will probably stop doing (or noticing) whatever else was previously going on in order to concentrate. In some scenarios this is fine – the sense of the bus around you melts away as you lose yourself in the music, the mugs rest unwashed in the dishwater whilst you close your eyes to listen – and in others, less so (car crashes, food poisoning and scorched clothing being the rather less desirable outcomes).

Crucially, in all of these scenarios, we are doing something else as well as listening. Somehow, just listening on its own doesn’t seem like enough of an occupation, and I know that I am myself guilty of feeling as if just listening is somehow not productive enough, not time-efficient enough. We have all been brainwashed by the concept of multi-tasking, and since music only requires your ears, that leaves four whole senses outrageously unoccupied, which is simply not good enough.

Image by Philippe Put

Except, of course, that’s nonsense. Careful, engaged listening is an amazing and enlightening thing. It reveals all kinds of fascinating details, because you’re actually actively paying attention to what’s going on, and how it’s happening. What shape and form is the piece? How does that change on the micro-level, and across the whole thing? Are there any striking changes of gear, unusual chords, out-of-character gestures, extended techniques? What colour is the sound and how do the musicians vary it? Do you get a sense of particular passages being tough to play? How do you think the piece feels – heavy or light, super-serious or comic – and how are the performers choosing to characterise it? Do you agree with their decision, can you imagine doing it another way? Can you breathe with the music or not, and does that bother you? Is the performance lacking in detail, or so nuanced that it seems over-cooked? The questions go on and on, and of course having the score in front of you as you listen makes all the difference too. If you play any of the instruments featured in the recording, you will probably be able to relate even more closely to what’s happening, and bring your own physicality into the way you hear the music. (As a pianist, I tend to feel the ghosts of chord shapes under my hands as I look at piano writing, and the shadow of space between my arms in passages that jump about.)

Listening in this way is revelatory, because of the degree of insight – analytical, performative, spatial, and so on – that it affords. And yet this is a kind of exercise which, I fear, is under threat. Listening has become something that most people do whilst they are doing something else as well, and dividing attention in this way removes any chance of really hearing what’s going on in the music. We are all too busy, too committed, too engaged with other things to just sit still with a score in our lap and explore a new sonic world without interruption. Those who loudly defend standard concert etiquette are, I suspect, the sort of people who really do listen, and the thought of ringing phones and rattling sweets and the fit of bronchitis which seems to have seized the gentleman in row H are all abhorrent to them, because they want to really listen to the performers in front of them. (Alas, being in a room with other people means community and compromise, and they need to get used to that – if you want an entirely well-behaved audience it’s probably easier to buy a CD and lock the front door.)

So I, for one, am going to remind myself of my week of intensive listening every time I get twitchy about ‘wasting time’ by sitting still in this way. Laying so many different performances of the same work side by side has been completely revelatory, and something I hope I have the chance to do again. I commend it to you: a quiet room, a comfortable chair, a score and a sound system. There is a universe of music to explore in this way, and much like attempting astronomical exploration, it can only really be done if you get far enough away from distractions, like people and pollution. In the quiet dark of an open field, gazing at the night sky with all your might… that’s when you see the stars most clearly.

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Katy’s ‘Building a Library’ will be broadcast on Saturday 11th July