The diluvial nature of modern media leaves almost no space for silence and very little time to pause and listen. But just because we are flooded doesn’t mean we have to drown. The challenge is to find the ways to cultivate the discipline and the patience necessary to learn and re-learn.
And that is perhaps the most challenging part of EuMuse music modules protocol – the act of listening - because it is not something that you take. It is something you have to do.
“One cannot hear music and noise at the same time.”
Henry David Thoreau
Sounds are what we hear, music is how we think, link, and feel. Similar to the pictorial images that emerge from the pixels, but they’re not identical with them - music is much more than matter of acoustical brain stimulation. And it is a fallacy to think you can understand pictures by reducing them to their pixels or music by reducing them to sound waves. On the contrary.
Why We Need To Learn How To Listen
Our musical knowledge is learned, the product of long experience; maybe not years spent over playing an instrument, but a lifetime spent absorbing music from our environment by default and/or by choice. Once you hear something you cannot “unhear” it.
The two most prominent tools that we have as conscious beings - our attention and our intention - combined determine the quality of our listening experience.
Hearing is essentially a passive, indiscriminate response to sound i.e., we have the sound and music in our life (noise, environmental sounds, background music) that happens to us passively and by chance.
Listening, on the other hand, is an active response to the phenomena of sound; it focuses in on certain sounds to the exclusion of others. It involves the will as well as a neurological process.
Conscious music listening - Goal-oriented Music Listening (GoML) i.e., having music in our lives by choice and design, is a skill attained through the same deliberate practice as any other pursuit of human excellence.
Listening to music, regarded as a skill-intensive art, too frequently mistaken for a talent or a passive pre-wired capacity, then becomes something that aids inner transformation versus something that fills our time.
Wholeness of experience itself is a participatory act – both of faculty of being and a function of becoming - to be mastered and refined in the course of listening.
*Persistence and determination are mirrored in the modern science data. Research shows that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything. In study after study, of composers, concert pianists, chess players, basketball players, fiction writers, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is roughly equivalent to three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years.
Listening to Music
On every new, repeated listening of the same musical piece one can find a new meaning. Not only because of potentially different interpretation of musical score, change of acoustic environment or soundscape, but because the landscape of our life is different and new as well, continuously “reloaded” by the very act of living.
“Liking” of Musical Piece
One can then begin to realize that music identity or “preference” for certain music piece/style depended not upon one's beliefs (inherited or manufactured), but it actually depended on how much attention one has paid to things that were other than “his-her” music identity. And as one deepens this intentionality and attention, one starts to broaden and deepen the sonic horizon and the sense of the music world.
Sonic Horizon – Past, Present and Future
We have a record of written words that shaped human cognition over the centuries, and we have insight to human behavior through archaeological records and images. Unfortunately, we don’t have a record of the sounds that people heard in the past. We don’t know how did Jerusalem sound in 425 BC, Constantinople in 1120, Vienna in 1598 or Tokyo in 1680. Yet, humans are shaped by the sounds they perceive. Every age has perceived a different set of sounds. Therefore, the minds of each age have worked differently. Unfortunately, this part of human history is unknown and often neglected. The earliest known recording of the human voice and the earliest known recording of music was produced in 1860 in Paris. There has been a world of transformation ever since.
EuMuse aims to increase the amount of human wellbeing and talents in three distinct ways. First, by identifying and linking the knowledge and data that already exist. Second, by connecting audience with an educated insight, guidance, and access to the right tools. Third, by creating connections that will amplify human creativity and intelligence via collaborative creation spaces.
In EuMuse work – I aim to emphatically refuse distortions, simplifications, and discriminations – with a goal to show that no sciences (musicology included) are neither neutral nor universal nor eternal and depend on the historical and cultural contexts that invent them.
Although EuMuse is credited to a single author, tangible and intangible contributions from many others permeate it throughout. When we observe the history as a long-term process of co-evolution then we may understand how every great invention, was simply a combination of pre-existing technologies.
One of the most essential elements of human wisdom at its best is humility – knowing that you don’t know everything – and faith - described as a trust in goodness.
Music can only manifest through, with and in time. Without time music doesn’t exist. Without time we don’t exist.
Marina de Moses