Learning to Listen

This afternoon I attended the second of two chamber music recitals given by young students in the Summer Music West 2007 program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. These tend to be uneven events, but there is usually a pretty close balance between disappointments and pleasant surprises. There was no information about the performers. However, it seemed as if the first half of the concert presented pre-teen students; and the second half performers were in their early teens. The sharpest differences in quality involved the string players, which should be no surprise; but it started me thinking about what separated the disappointments from the pleasant surprises and whether or not it was age related.

The greatest disappointment was a performance of the first movement of Haydn's "Lark" quartet (the second time this week that Haydn proved to be the most problematic composer on the program). Once again we were dealing with a work of deceptive simplicity in which the performers seem to have been taken in by the deception. However, even if we grant that teasing out the highly experimental nature of Haydn's music may be a bit much for pre-teens, there was also the problem that the very sound was disappointing. There was no sense that these four budding musicians were playing as a quartet. It seemed as if every individual was struggling to get the right notes played at the right time, dealing with the challenges to the fingering hand without worrying about whether the specific pitches were blending properly. The result was no blend at all, making for harsh dissonances that pretty much killed any "lark-like" atmosphere.

Compare this with an older quartet of performers who took on the first movement of the early Beethoven Opus 18, Number 4 C minor quartet. This group had an authentic ensemble sound. Yet it was also one in which each instrument was playing with the expressiveness of its own "voice," which is precisely what Beethoven's score demands of the quartet members. The result was a bit rough around the edges but just as exciting (if not more so) than many of the more "polished professional" performances I have heard of this quartet.

So is the problem one of age. Is there some Piaget-like discontinuity in "the child's conception of musical performance?" In the earlier stage one is an individual struggling with the physical challenges of delivering each note on time, barely listening to the sounds of one's own notes, let alone those of anyone else. On the other side of the discontinuity, one now has the capacity to listen to one's own sounds, those of the other performers, and, perhaps most important, the sound of the music as a whole. Is this nothing more than a case of the "wiring" of cognitive development?

I'm not yet sure. Another explanation may be that so much of music education is so focused, at least in the earliest stages, with playing everything correctly that little attention is given to listening as an equally important activity. The very idea that we need to learn how to listen suffers benign neglect, yet it is just as great a pedagogical challenge as learning to play. Back when I was in Singapore, I had a small group experimenting with using computer visualizations as a way to cultivate the skill of how to listen; but, since the project did not have a financially viable future, it was allowed to languish. (We could not even get the funds to file at least one patent on what we felt were the most important inventions from our research.) This project only scratched the surface of what it meant to learn how to listen. With today's better technology and more experience in trying to understand the nature of listening in a broader range of musical examples, it would not take much to tempt me to return to that line of research!