Listening

When I drive to work, which is only a few times a month when I have an event I have to go straight to after hours, I oftentimes take the opportunity to listen to the radio and peruse the offerings that the public have to select from. Sometime in the last year I started a game with myself where I could only scan past two songs before I had to listen to one entire song, so that I would be forced to listen to whole songs and try and figure out what makes them tick. The restriction makes it so that I only skip the really bad stuff (I always make sure I have a skip left when I get around to 95.5, the smooth jazz station), and part of the exercise is for me to try and find the good in any given song. I'll admit that it's sometimes difficult, but there's oftentimes a great bass line or a cool keyboard hook that I can hone in on and dig. I'm also really into examining the production techniques and values that are prevalent in today's music. I caught a stone cold breakdown in the middle of some hokey disco tune this morning that made it all worthwhile.

Listening is a funny thing. There is a wide spectrum in what people conventionally refer to as listening.  Most people understand that there is a difference between hearing and listening; hearing implies basic acknowledgment of auditory input, while listening connotes an active processing of the information encoded in that auditory signal. That there are degrees of listening is plainly obvious to anyone who has been ignored while speaking, or to any person who has tried to deeply listen to music or to another human being with a receptivity and stillness of mind that allows a deeper listening to occur. The degree of listening is more involved with the state of the mind of the listener than with the physical mechanisms of the ears, and one’s own disposition and mental framework determines the depth and extent to which one listens.  Listening intently is largely a matter of where attention is placed, and how well the individual is able to maintain that attention in a focused manner, allowing them to receive without distraction or mental interruption.

In our society, I think listening to music is most often passive, and when it's active it's usually in the context of dancing. The idea of background music is pervasive, whether it's while we're doing the dishes, driving, or any other number of activities. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there's a whole different realm of listening that occurs when it's the primary activity. The way you read a book, or even watch a movie that has an engrossing plot and you're forced to process possibilities and emotions.

One of the only musics that seems to have the luxury of active listeners most of time is European classical music. It's an art music, you go to a big theater to hear it, and you sit, and you listen. Sometimes I wonder if jazz is going through some kind of awkward adolescence, moving from a popular music to an art music, and what that transition really means for the artists and the audience is something I'm still considering.

Tarthang Tulku is a rinpoche in the Tibetan Nyingma school of Vajrayana Buddhism. As a teacher in the Western Hemisphere, he has developed a system of understanding the world around us in a series he wrote called “Time, Space and Knowledge,” the first book of which bears the same name. Tulku espouses a phenomenology and cosmology that understands conventional time as being qualitatively different from what he terms Great Time. The clumsiness of this verbal expression appears to create a dichotomy that places Great Time as superior and separate. However, according to Tulku conventional time is included in Great Time, and indeed is a necessary doorway to this experientially different state. Great Time and Space are expansive and accommodating in nature, and it is out of this great expanse that we and all other phenomena are constantly arising. Amongst his various visualization and meditational practices, there are several exercises he espouses that utilize listening. One such exercise's introductory instructions are as follows:

Sit quietly and attend to the presence of sounds. You can use speech, music, or any sounds that happen to appear. Do not get trapped in the labels and significations that sounds bear, but concentrate on the quality of the sounds themselves. This amounts to learning to see more deeply into all communicated presences, rather than being stopped by their surface partitioning (Tulku, 187).

I like that a lot. Cultivating a non-discriminatory reaction to sonic phenomena to better understand and appreciate their qualities as sounds.  The process of labeling and identifying is a reactionary mechanism of the mind that has a limiting result, and this is an attempt to open it up a bit.

There's so much to explore in the world of sound, or as William Parker calls it the Tone World. In his discussions of the phenomena in space, Tulku writes: “What we perceive as solid or opaque ‘things’, produced by a given ‘setting’, define by contrast what we perceive as the ‘space’ of that level” (Tulku, 4).  Similarly, there is an attribute of sound that can be described as sonic opacity, the quality of a sound as being separate from silence.  If we can position sound and silence as two halves of a whole, then that whole can be approached as music, and one way of viewing music is that it is based upon the practices of manipulating sound and silence.  The way sound merges into silence reveals a spectrum of sonic phenomena that includes many gradations, and it is only our perception of silence as the absence of sound that creates the experience of sonic solidity or opacity. Indeed, silence can be understood as the medium in which sound exists, an ever present canvas that at times can be accentuated or eliminated based upon the choices of the musicians.  Silence is an active accommodating medium in which sound and music can be expressed.

It is also important to note that silence is merely the “...absence of audible sound-rhythm” (Smith, 1973), a boundary that is defined by our senses.  Therefore, there is no such thing as absolute silence, only our perception of the lack of sound.  The conventionally accepted dichotomy between silence and sound can be seen as an expression of a “higher order unity” (Tulku, 9), which is music.  Silence and sound phenomena exist in our perception, and the expression of their unity is the making of music that is the manipulation of these two elements.  The higher order unity in music is a microcosmic expression of unity that exists as well on a macrocosmic level, and as such can be interpreted in the realm of spiritual understanding if that is the goal of the musician or listener. It was the basis of the exploration of ancient rshis or seers in the Vedic tradition, the idea that the very large could be approached by understanding the very small - the rta, or cosmic order.

There are some fascinating paradigms for understanding the act of listening and improvisational music making available to us in the realms of general systems theory and the Buddhist concept of pattica sammupada or mutually arising phenomena. I'm going to adapt some writing I've done on the subject to better suit the blog format. More on that later....

Smith, Ismael Wadada Leo. “notes (8 pieces ) | source | a new | world | music: creative music”. Self published, 1973.

Tulku, Tarthang. Time Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality. Emeryville: Dharma Publishing, 1977.