Can listening to classical music more closely enrich how you experience the world? Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, contributing essayist and critic for The New York Times and founder of Beginner’s Ear listening events, leads a fascinating new Roundtable course exploring how it can. In The Art of Listening she shares her insights and the skills anyone can learn, as she demystifies classical music along the way. She talked with us ahead of the course.
As a classical music critic, you’re a professional listener. Yet a single concert in 2018 changed how you experience music and sparked your interest in changing how others do too. Please tell us about your experience, and what you took away from it.
It was a lunchtime concert in Princeton that began with a simple guided meditation. What made the concert so impactful was the amount of attention placed on the silence preceding the music, and the role of the audience in creating that silence – enriching it with their attention and stillness. The meditation teacher eventually rang a chime, and I remember that from behind closed eyes, deep in the space I had entered, the sound of that single chime struck me as overwhelmingly rich in overtones and colors. It blew my mind.
The concert that followed was a clarinet and piano recital. I kept my eyes closed and had this uncanny feeling of the music almost unfolding from inside me, and the border between me and the sounds blurring in a way that was extraordinary and delicious. What I learned and had never really considered was how we can frame the attention of the audience in a way that co-creates the whole experience. And how the silence of the room and the space between the notes is a vital component of the musical performance.
I’m hoping participants come away from this course thinking differently about both silence and sonic climaxes, with tools they can apply to any piece of music – and beyond.
Can you give an example of the “beyond,” or a way your listening has evolved outside the concert hall?
I spent 16 years living in Lower Manhattan, a noisy place. In that time, I was also active as a music critic, and going to as many as a hundred concerts a year, so I was hearing many more manmade sounds than sounds of nature. I take pride in being a good listener and I really open my ears, especially to contemporary music. I’ve had some really intense experiences listening to contemporary compositions that use extended technique where composers are playing with sounds they can get by something like dragging a bow over the wooden shoulder of a violin instead of the strings, and I think I sensitized my ear to hearing the expressiveness of these noise-like musical sounds.
Then in 2017/18, I spent a year in Germany with my children to be closer to my parents and to experience the world from a different country. There we lived in a little village on the outskirts of Hamburg, with poplar trees outside my apartment – poplars have a really great way of filtering wind – and I was suddenly plunged into a world of natural sounds. I was attending far fewer concerts because I wasn’t reviewing regularly. I would walk my youngest daughter to school, and there were these magnificent sounds of nature – wind and trees and rain – and I realized that I was enjoying them really deeply and listening to them as if someone had composed them for me. It felt almost as if my job was to read expressive intent into the trees. All of my listening in the concert hall had enriched my experience with nature.
Is it difficult to learn to listen to classical music more fully? Does someone need to have a level of musical knowledge?
It’s not difficult at all. And no, it’s often just a matter of drawing attention to something. It’s very important to me to counteract the intimidation and sense of fear that can come from the well-meaning sense of awe people project about classical music. There’s a double-edged sword when it comes to the way we are encouraged to enjoy concerts. There’s a great focus on information – on pre-concert lectures, program notes, facts about the composer, instrumentation – it creates a sense that you need to know in order to enjoy, and I don’t think that’s true at all. What really blew me away at that concert in Princeton was the stripping away of not just the knowing but the needing to know. I got to a place where I was experiencing sound at a visceral, bodily level, and it was transformative. And deeply pleasurable. Now, I’m not going to be leading meditation in this course – we’re going to be dealing in the realm of language and imagery – but I am hoping to bring people to a place where they allow themselves to trust their own experience of music.
What are some of the things you have listeners focus on?
Music, if not telling a story, is setting a scene. There’s a way we can learn to listen to music by identifying simple processes that happen. Climaxes, peaks, crescendos, the build-up of tension – these are things we experience all around us, whether in an emotional crescendo of anger or fear, a release in a sexual way, something reaching a tipping point – we can hear and identify all of these things in instrumental music, and these analogies can be helpful both in finding a way to anchor your attention and in hearing things happen without needing program notes or a degree in music theory. In reverse, what might silence represent? By identifying it in a particular context, one might look at negative space in other areas life and experience it in a new light.
Can you give an example of a musical selection you use to illustrate your points and what you hope is revealed in the process?
The course is in two sessions, the first focused on silence, the second on loudness. With the session on silence, I love to begin with Monteverdi’s Orfeo which, to some degree, is the origin myth of music. It’s the earliest opera to have survived, and it’s about the power of music – about Orfeo trying to bring his dead bride back from the underworld through the power of music. At the very beginning of the Prologue, there is a character called La musica, an allegory of music, who sings of her power. And she has this moment where she sings about how even the birds in the trees fall silent when she appears, because they are listening. Monteverdi just stops everything – the instrumental accompaniment pauses for a moment – and you’re pulled into this space where ears that have been turned on and sensitized to music are suddenly confronted with nothing. In that moment, you can actually hear yourself listening. It’s the kind of magical moment where it’s not quite clear if you’re in the realm of silence or experiencing the power of music.
How can learning to listen to music more fully enrich our experience of the world?
Learning to listen to music (and we’re talking about instrumental music – as soon as texts are introduced, there’s a decoding that comes with it) is a very pure way of honing your ear. It trains a certain cognitive patience that we could all use to cultivate in a world of digital overwhelm and stimulation.
Music can teach us to listen with a wide-angled, sustained focus. Listening to contemporary music is part of what ended up enriching my experience of the natural world. I think we all have difficulty being present in our environment, so hearing sounds in nature or in life that are deepened by our experience in the concert hall or listening to recorded music is a way to be less distracted and more alive.
The Art of Listening with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim begins Sunday, March 17 at Roundtable – details and registration here.