Karl Menninger
Listening is an activity that connects us deeply to others. It can change how we perceive the world, and then, how we decide to live in it.
To listen suggests an open, receptive stance, without necessarily knowing what will arrive. It suggests alertness, willingness. Listening is essentially an act of respect and generosity. It is a time for keeping our egos quiet, for hearing others’ needs and opinions. Many of the great leaders of historical and contemporary times, the visionaries, the peacemakers, the activists and healers, are essentially great listeners. A great leader has an ability to listen acutely to the concerns of their era, to imagine what might be possible, and to bring that to life. It’s interesting to think about what that could mean for the role of musicians in society now.
Musicians are consummate listeners. Our attentiveness is a gift, with potentially broad-reaching applications. I would love musicians to realise that we have skills that go way beyond the specifics of our craft as instrumentalists, composers, researchers, programmers, therapists, funders, managers, critics, teachers, administrators, broadcasters, producers – whatever our musical practice is. Listening with care, hearing complexity, and noticing subtlety need not be purely professional music practices, but tenets for living. Such listening has radical potential.
I’ve titled this talk Learning to Listen because I think listening is what music uniquely offers – a space to encounter, to experience, to extend our thinking and imagination…
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was an exceptional listener. Between 1947 and 1955, as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, she listened continuously. She spent a great deal of her life not only writing music, but writing and speaking about music. She was an advocate for the artform and its practitioners, in many different contexts. Her words are forthright, considered, intelligent, and spirited. It seems that her desire was to convince as many people as possible about the joys of new music, by framing it in ways that made it accessible and interesting to broad audiences. She worked as a composer, writer, reviewer, concert organiser, public speaker, director of organisations, fundraiser, compere and presenter, committee member, publicist, impresario, producer and entrepreneur of her own works and others. She’s a great role model for being able to keep one eye on detail, one on the big picture, being able to balance her own work and needs as an artist with her strong sense for community, being single-minded about the demands of her compositional work, and able to see her role as a musician in the world as necessarily multi-facetted.
.. I think of tonight’s music as a touchstone, a way of giving the words breathing space, and a way of bringing us back again and again to the essence of why we’re here.
What you’ll hear from me is, in essence, a practitioner’s musings, a series of reflections, interlaced with music. The thread that binds the parts is my imagination of the spirit of Peggy Glanville-Hicks: a spirit urging us to be daring, to act with integrity, to imagine what’s possible, and to work hard to create it, to be passionate and unstinting in our support of one another, and of music.
In the words of Winston Churchill: Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
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For four years, I worked with a community in and around Bermagui, NSW. It was an experience that taught me more than I can say. In theory, I was the Artistic Director of a music festival called Four Winds. In practice, I found that my role was much more sprawling. It had to do with care, with listening, with custodianship, with imagining a future, with hearing what a place and a community yearned for and helping them to make that real. I had the privilege of coming from outside and being able to reflect things back in new ways. I also had the privilege of being invited in, to dream and make creative projects with a disparate, diverse group of people.
Often, coming home from my time there, I would feel desolate about my own limited ability, in the face of what seemed such essential work. I wondered what resources I could draw on within myself, to make a decent contribution. What I realised one day, to my relief, was that this project was chamber music writ large. Fundamentally, what I needed to do was to listen closely, and respond. I understood that I could take my sensitivity to tone, nuance, sound, silence, body language, and cultivate that in a much broader context.
I understood too, that my performance courage could be useful. That strange, long practised ability to be steely clear in the moment, under scrutiny. The willingness to stand and dare, to put myself on the line in a public place.
And I revelled in music’s ability to start conversations, to expand possibilities, to ask radical questions, to be clear, idealistic, uncompromising and fierce, as well as gentle and healing.
I learnt there about new types of virtuosity. Not just the pristine, athletic concert hall type, but the sleeves-rolled-up virtuosity of trying to do justice to many viewpoints, to honour different perspectives, and weave together complexity and inconsistency, in much less privileged spaces.
So my listening skills, my precarious freelance existence, my life on the edge of most people’s realities, helped me hear fragile, joyful, sometimes troubled, always wonderfully complex stories, and, together with a community, to find ways to articulate them.
In the words of John Berger, a hero of mine:
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.
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When we think about making music, let’s think about how to create communities of listeners around our work. It is these communities that will sustain us, and our artistic practice.
When we think about success, let’s not just define it in terms of money, or profile. Success need not mean simply increase in cash or audience sizes. Success can be a much less obvious, much more long-reaching, stealthy thing. It can be allied to meaning, to care, to hope, to change, to possibility.
When we speak of profit, let’s not just limit our terms to financial profit. Let’s see profit also as an ability to carry on creating work, money as a transfer of energy that allows time and space to listen, to make and to communicate to our best ability.
I’m not pretending that finances and politics have no part in our discussions. I’m not pretending that art is a pure space, separate from the sordid concerns of the world. On the contrary. I’m just asking that when we think about the role of the arts and artists in our society, we encourage our visionary selves, as well as our canniest, most strategic selves. Both are necessary in order for us, and for music to flourish.
Let’s define any of our terms, any of our frames of reference in the broadest sense. Let’s aspire to become more generous, more open, and more supportive. Let’s try to embody the biggest possible vision we can hold for ourselves, in whatever our role may be. Let’s link our own work with other people and allow our collective spaces to constantly expand and deepen.
Let’s never forget the specifics, the details, and give them the care and attention they need and deserve. But let’s try also to take a long view, a wide view, a view that gives room for change, for difference, for uncertainty, for conflict as well as harmony. Let’s try to begin discussions, and to make decisions – even about small things – out of a perspective that takes in the most expansive definition of what music can be, and what role we can play in the long, long story of that.
I know you know all this, but it feels important to say it in a public way, not as a polemic, but as a quietly spoken, heartfelt affirmation that we are all in this together, that our love for music, and by definition then, for listening to one another, makes us privileged and powerful beyond what we often realise.
When we think about music, and our lives with it, let’s remember our indigenous friends, and their idea that music, land, story, are not for owning, but for sharing.
Musicians are consummate listeners. Being deeply attentive, hearing complexity, and noticing subtlety are not just professional music practices, but tenets for living. Learning to listen has radical potential.
This is an edited extract from the 15th annual Peggy Glanville-Hicks Address 2013. The full address is available from the New Music Network.
