Approaches to Listening Podcast Episode 11: Combining Thinking and Feeling

William: Welcome back to Approaches to Listening. I'm William Taylor and I'm joined today by Stephen Taylor. He is a relation. But I am excited to interview Stephen because I know a lot of musicians, but I know very few who listen to music as well or as much as Stephen does. So I'm excited for our discussion.

In today's episode, we'll be discussing the relationship between feeling and thinking and how they relate to listening. A foundational idea of the podcast is that feeling and thinking unlock the potential of the other. So it's like each has the key to say, 50% of music's potential, but you can only get that full 50% in relationship to the other.

So if you utilize only thinking in your listening, then you have less than 50%, but feeling can help you get the rest of that 50% of thinking and vice versa. So today we're going to explore that relationship. So Stephen, thanks for joining me.

Stephen: I'm glad to be able to join. Thank you for inviting me.

William: Yeah, any thoughts on that opening idea that feeling and thinking work together and unlock the other?

Stephen: Well, I often think about subject matter experts in any field, doesn't matter what kind of discipline, who get uber excited when they're talking about something they know, especially when they find an audience who's willing to let them talk about something they know. So I've had this experience talking to finance people, insurance people, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, and lots of language people, literature professors, writers, when they start talking about something they know really well from a thinking kind of perspective, there's often this intensified feeling. And I think that sort of exemplifies on the one side, the sort of thinking-first side, how thinking can enhance feeling is the new forms of appreciation that are possible when you can appreciate it from an analytical standpoint, not just from an upfront emotional one.

And I can give an example in music. Think about musicians who, if you ever encounter a musician who gets really excited when they finally figure out how to count something, you know, or when they finally figure out, this is what it was supposed to sound like with the rest of the group. You know, maybe they're in an orchestra or a band and then the pieces come together. There's this element where, you know, you probably did some individual thinking in practice and reviewing your part beforehand, but the feeling then gets intensified when you have some kind of mental realization of these pieces coming together. And so anytime you're listening to music, you don't have to be the person bringing it about. You don't have to be the performer, I think, experience a similar kind of enjoyment. So those are just some of my starting thoughts on thinking versus feeling when it comes from a place of thinking first. But I believe you could take a similar angle of feeling first and feeling intensifying thinking, which is maybe a harder one to quantify or to put a finger on, but I think is equally interesting also.

William: Yeah, and hopefully we'll get into both of those more tonight. So the first question I wanted to lead out with is: when is it time to prioritize thinking in your listening? Are there better times than others to put on the thinking cap and just go full throttle into thinking? And I had a couple examples quickly come to mind, such as for performing musicians. When you're starting to learn a piece, by that time, you've probably had a kind of emotional, visceral reaction to the piece when you listen to it or played through it and chose, I'm gonna learn this piece. But when you're learning it, take a big piece like the Franck Violin Sonata, you have to do that methodically, it's so big. It's too much to take in all at once, so you have to engage with it analytically, piece by piece, to make sure that you can learn it well and that you're not just spinning tires as you try to, I don't know, play through the whole sonata time and time again. And then there's lots of scholarly projects, of course, that as you're figuring out what the project will be, as you're figuring out the scope of the project. That's just a thinking cap moment where that will orient you the right way. That'll get you to where you want to go. But yeah, your thoughts on when you should prioritize thinking in your listening?

Stephen: This is an interesting question for me because I'm someone who really enjoys thinking. I really enjoy analyzing music from as much of a factual standpoint as I can. For instance, saying, this is a dominant relationship. That was a perfect fourth. Or, this was a Neapolitan relationship or the key has modulated. Any of those kinds of things that are fairly quantifiable and measurable, I really enjoy. So it's hard for me to separate some of the thinking and feeling from that standpoint. But I've noticed that, I mean, for sure in practice, thinking makes a lot of sense, thinking about how you maximize your time. But then as performers too, that in a live performance, there's a great danger in overthinking and there's potentially some costs to the more experiential filtering, right? Whether it's a cost to letting yourself emote or potentially a cost to letting yourself experience the moment and be present with the music. So there's some places maybe I wouldn't want to put thinking first. Going back to when you would, when you would want to put thinking first.

For me, this is very much a skill like playing an instrument. And so I think eventually when you've done this enough, when you've spent enough time thinking about music, analyzing music, experimenting with analytical filters, then I feel like when this is a filter you can access at will, to me then there's almost no wrong time to use it. Again, I feel like in performance sometimes there's more caveats than others when you are the performer, but otherwise, I feel almost always free and benefited from using the thinking filters when I listen.

William: Yeah, I am curious because I think of experiences, shared experiences, where we've interacted with people who, let's just say the joy of music has gone out of their lives maybe through study, extensive study– 

Stephen: Yes. Yes. And we both have met the students who specifically said things like, “ear training ruined my relationship with music,” or, “music theory took the enjoyment out of music,” or, “form analysis sapped the life out of everything that is Western music.” You know, things like that.

My thoughts on that are, it always reminds me of being a college student, not only of my own ear training and music theory coursework. For those of you listeners who aren't familiar, I'm not a professional musician, but I did do a number of music courses as a student, which were beneficial for me both as a listener and as a performer. But I spent a lot of time in the writing classroom, taking writing coursework.

And I realized in writing classes that there's a similar thing going on where there are a lot of very emotive writers and wannabe writers, and there are also a lot of very analytical ones. But for a lot of these younger, less experienced writers, we had to learn these analytical skills before we could accurately get across what we intended to get across, right? If we wanted to convey an emotion, a lot of times we had to analyze and learn some of these hard skills of how to convey something, how to remove the fluff, whatever it was to present the emotion in a way that is accessible to the reader. And for a lot of writers, they experience a similar thing to the music theory students and the ear training, the aural skills students, right? Where they would get so burned out on analyzing that they would lose their enjoyment of reading, or express at least that they had lost their enjoyment of reading.

And I felt something slightly similar, but for me it was crossing a threshold of just having practiced the skills enough to the point that then I could easily decide whether I wanted to use them at the moment or not. And it really did become, in writing, as easy as that as saying, now I am analyzing, now I'm just reading. And I believe it's a similar thing with music, where if you practice those skills enough, you can say, I want to analyze now. Or, I'm not worried about it. I can listen without that. I recently listened to the Liszt Petrarch Sonnets, listened to them for the first time to my knowledge. This was a recommendation from you. And I did virtually no analysis while listening to them until the very, very end of one. And I was like, “that was a really dense, interesting chord that the performer sort of lingered on here. What was that?” And that's the only time I was aware of an analyzing throughout the process. But it felt very easy to just switch into that at that point where it's like, I've been feeling something, I felt something amazing here, I'm really curious what it was. And it was easy just to switch that filter on and use it to enhance my enjoyment.

William: I think that flexibility is so key and I feel like those musicians who developed all these analytical skills through these courses and then express this thought, it's like I'm not having fun, I think that I would categorize them as stuck in one mode of listening, overusing tools, or maybe not using them in a varied way. It's like, I've developed this tool, this is what I'm supposed to do. And it's like, well, there's other options.

Stephen: It reminds me of the one person I have ever had a conversation about music with who expressed that he didn't really listen to music. Again, only one person I've ever talked to who admitted such a thing. And he's like, “Well, actually, you know, sometimes I do when I'm studying because it helps, like, you know, get rid of distractions.” And I was like, “What?” My mind was blown and what I discovered was he essentially was using it as a some kind of feeling filter where, you know, he sometimes would have some sort of emotional response to music, but his engagement with it was so low. His threshold for engagement, his commitment to being an active participant in the experience was so low. He saw this as background noise to help him do something else as opposed to a thing he's going to do for its own sake. And I think that's one of the skills you have to practice if you're stuck is, you know, if you're spending all this time, for instance, as an academic doing music because it's part of getting your degree or part of your job, then you're probably going to have to spend some time doing music just for fun, which might mean you have to do a different kind of music to give yourself a break. Maybe it means you have to explore a type of music you've never explored before.

I think of a time where I was kind of burned out on listening to symphonies, as crazy as that is to me to say that now when I love listening to symphonies. And I went to this opera performance, this opera singer from the Met who was singing Duke Ellington tunes. I was like, “okay, this is not so far removed from what I normally would listen to,” but it was a very different experience than going and listening to Beethoven's Eroica Symphony or something like that.

And it was really refreshing and energizing to just go hear music in a different context with different performance expectations and to be able to explore it without any sense of obligation or work or anything like that. So I don't know if this answers sort of the implied question that you were getting to, but I do think that changing your listening habits and engaging in a different type of listening is a good way to get unstuck.

William: Yeah, and I'm curious, because thus far we've talked about academic musicians, academic listeners, and I'm curious about those who are more in the field of amateurs, just those who aren't academics, those who don't study music intensely. When would you recommend they learn systems of analysis to engage with their music? Because I feel like the standard, as far as I understand it, is that most of them engage with music from a feeling standpoint. Especially as someone who, you've expressed, love thinking. I love thinking about music too. And it offers so much to you. When would you recommend that for someone who doesn't know how to do it?

Stephen: This is a good question that I think in many ways it probably is dependent on what their goals and purposes are with music. Thinking about myself as an amateur musician from a performance standpoint, I see immense value in understanding, this is a cadence and I might want to put some stress here to make the cadence work properly.

But as a listener, you're never thinking about performing, if you're just going to enjoy the music, then I feel like it might be a very different experience. Whenever you're going to a new genre, a new set of musical conventions, that to me is a space where thinking is really valuable. I'll give an example. I went to listen to my first Gamelan concert, first live Gamelan experience I'd had, not too long ago.

And in preparation for that, I did a little reading, I did a little other listening, listening just from primarily a combination of thinking and sort of emotional exploration to get familiar with what the experience could be like. Thinking was really helpful there when I went to this new musical space for me. In the orchestra world, they often talk about how much energy goes into educating audiences, right. Educating audiences on, “now we're gonna play a later Schoenberg piece, where it's not gonna be what you might expect,” you know, or “now we're gonna play a post-minimalist piece, where, or maybe a full minimalist piece, where, you know, you might not experience what you thought. If you came here for a Haydn Surprise Symphony, you'll be surprised when you hear the minimalist work.” I think in orchestras they've realized this value in education and helping people appreciate a little more. But I think the same is true for any genre of music. If you get educated on what is great about country music and then if you think about, wow, these are musicians who are so good at singing in tune and they use this nasally tone to be so in tune, like that's something I can get excited about and I do not like the subject matter of country music almost ever.

So I believe with virtually any genre, when you come to it as a newcomer, there's value in thinking about it to learn new ways to appreciate it. But there's a danger too, for sure, that if thinking becomes the dominant part of your paradigm and your experience, your engagement with the music, especially for an amateur listener, that might take away from some opportunities, right? But again, to me, I think it is a matter of practice. You've got to practice engaging with different kinds of music. You have to practice considering musical experiences you haven't had before. Which is another thing that a lot of academics are maybe not the greatest at, is trying music outside their palette.

William: That's fair, and I feel like there's a default, and it gets tricky, because there's a default to, in that moment where you're trying music outside your palette, whether you're an amateur or a professional, to think about it, but jump to the critical filter without really analyzing it and seeing what's there and what works, what the rules are, and then as soon as you criticize it, without knowing the rules, that's a pretty idiotic approach, but I've been very guilty of it. I'm sure you remember me as a teenager criticizing all music that wasn't classical because I was taking the classical rules and holding it up to the pop songs our sisters listened to. And I'm like, this music is trash. Instead of engaging with it analytically and saying, this is what's here. This is what's important in this genre. Okay, this is a meaningful piece of music. So I think there is that temptation and it's interesting. I feel like one of the important things is to really keep in mind the space for the exploratory filter. Which I like to describe as this widening your perception. And that goes hand in hand with analysis before you engage with a piece. You're just saying, okay, what's here? And it's a filter that I feel like not a lot of people, like you mentioned, academic musicians don't always know how to go there.

Partially because I think we have such an extensive vocabulary on, well, this is good music. This is what we like. This is what the most trained musicians in an academic setting play and perform and love. And so it's interesting how there could be all these pitfalls. Even when you're intentionally trying to deepen your relationship with music. And so I think practice and just having a framework and knowing how you're listening and why it's so important.

Stephen: Now I have two, I think, I hope important tangents if I can go off them here. First would be this, that one of the things I studied in my primarily language-based time in school was something called transportation theory. This is studying a phenomenon in which our counter-argument skills disappear because we get swept up and transported by the media we are engaging with.

This is primarily used to study storytelling. So music is not exactly in the same field, but a lot of it is measuring emotional affect in a way that is comparable to music, parallel to music certainly. And so what transportation scholars have found is there are several criteria that make transportation more likely and several that make it less likely. So some of the things that make it more likely are there's some elements of quality, with a book, for instance, if it is a bestseller, it's more likely to be transportive. If it is hailed as a literary classic, it is more likely to transport the reader. Unless either one are assigned as reading. If it is an assigned reading, the transportation likelihood goes way down, even with something that would otherwise be hugely transportive, like Shakespeare or Jane Austen or a Stephen King novel. Just by virtue of it being assigned, the likelihood to have an emotional experience goes down and the counter-arguing mechanisms go up. And so if you relate that to music, I believe there's a comparable thing of when you're forced to engage, you've got this break that's already there and ready, this counter-argument mechanism, whether it's a critical filter, a thinking filter, whatever it is that could inhibit your enjoyment, your appreciation, your engagement with the music. And so when we think about academics, academic approaches and how we try to teach people to engage and study the chord progressions and identify the intervals and things like that, those assignments do have a real risk, I believe, of hurting your students’ appreciation. And this might be just inherent in, you'll probably find things in any education, that whenever you try to teach someone, there's a risk of them not wanting to do it just because people like to be stubborn. But certainly when it comes to things that cause affect and emotional response, that's a real danger. 

And if I can give an example of this now without going too far off the tangent train, in English, particularly in studies of poetry, we often talk about the poetic genius, which is sort of this concept that on the one hand, it might be that you can express really powerful, important thoughts through poetry and language. You can be sort of a prophet through words. And on the other side, there's this element of poetic genius that is about being able to be moved by beauty. And so it's this idea that you are more susceptible to beauty. You are more able to experience it and find it and have an emotional response or an almost spiritual response to it. And in the Romantic period, they viewed this truly as genius. You were born with this. To quote TwoSet Violin, “Geniuses are born, not created.” So this was the idea 200 years ago. And then English as a discipline in college and I guess high school too, we've tried to teach people to have the poetic genius so many times. Let's teach people how to appreciate poetry so they can feel more beauty in the world, which I think is a very noble goal and I totally believe is possible. But once again, you have this danger when you try to force that to happen. And so that's the cautionary tale. Just as there are the English students who are burned out and will never read anymore, or the musicians who are burned out and don't listen anymore, if you overthink the feeling, there's just this risk that you're gonna separate yourself from what it is you wanna get out of it.

William: I've seen that a lot as I've worked with other musicians. Something my current teacher right now, who I had on the podcast, Dr. Douglass, he talks about in our class, is he said more than once, “Remember that you have a choice. You're in the program right now, but you still have choices: to be here, to do the things, to do them in certain ways.” And I feel like that's one of the advantages of knowing the four filters and just having them in the back of your brain. You can say, I have choice on how I listen. I have choice on how I engage. Cause in those moments where you feel like choice is gone. Yeah, that’s some artistic chokehold when you're performing and you're like, well, there's one right way to play Mozart. So I have this, tiny little target that I have to hit and you know, that's the first four measures and then I need to hit it again and then I need to hit it for the next 20 minutes. Man, that's a really demanding approach. But if you have more choices than your engagement just increases, I think.

Stephen: And that absolutely is the paradoxical overlap with these cautionary sort of tales I've been hinting at. If nobody teaches you how to scan a poem, you don't have the choice to engage with poetry that way. Same thing with music. If nobody teaches you or you never learn what a perfect cadence is or what harmonic minor is versus natural minor, then you just don't have the choice to engage in those thinking-focused ways. Education is giving these additional choices.

William: Yeah, it is just one of the academic struggles where everything has to be measured and so assignments are a part of the gig. But yeah, let's move on to the second part of this question. We've talked about it some, but when would you say it's time to prioritize feeling in your listening?

Stephen: This might not be a great response, but basically, “whenever you want” is kind of my response. If you want to feel something in music, I can think of almost nothing that is quicker to incite feeling than music. So it's my opinion there is almost no wrong time. I mean, this is similar to what I said about thinking, but even in practice, I think when you're in the practice room trying to get ready for something. I think even then feeling is so important. When I was most serious about violin practice, which is violin is my primary instrument, routinely before I practiced, I would spend five to ten minutes listening to some great violinist play some great piece. And the idea was I want to watch their technique a little bit, see how they play. And then I want to feel something that gets me excited to play myself. And I found that that was a huge motivator. It might not have made my practices the most efficient when I was all hyped up and like, I want to play music now sometimes more than I want to practice. But it was a consistent source of enjoyment that made my practices more of an enjoyable thing. Again, who's to say whether that's good or bad because I did not end up being a great violinist, you know, put in a decent number of hours practicing, but my practicing technique was not the best, it's clear, for actually developing skill. But I think that element of feeling, even in the practice room, can be hugely motivational and if you lose it, if you lose the ability to feel, that's when I feel like thinking would be the chore. I can't imagine my thinking about music being separated from my feeling. That to me would be boring. And so if a musician has experienced that, that they have forgotten how to feel while thinking, or they've never learned how and they're being forced or pressured to think, then yeah, I can certainly understand why that would be a source of burnout and pain and resentment toward music. So long story short, I feel like there's no wrong moment to feel when engaging with music.

William: Yeah, I'd like to add on, just take that and add my own take to it. For me, I think that feeling is really important to prioritize when you want music to give something back. When you're trying to put something into music, to build your understanding of a piece, to build your ability to perform it, those are great times to do your analysis, to do your in-depth, you know, really analytical practice. But when you want something back, I feel like feeling is the direct connection to the music. Thinking is a connection. It can be a very strong connection, but I don't quite see how it can be direct, like totally uninhibited. I think that feeling is that direct connection. And I think, I don't know if we've talked about this example, I was just listening to some music before this and there was a lot going on, it was an orchestral piece. And as soon as I engaged with a couple pieces, some of the other pieces just vanish. They vanish from my experience. They vanish from my perception, my understanding. And in that moment, I'm only connected with a part. And I think that the part can't offer the feeling, the experience that the whole can.

And so when thinking, I think it's true and I think it's worth remembering that that's engaging with a part of the whole. And now there are some parts of the whole, like great soloists on top of an orchestra, that man, you can connect with that and there's more than you could possibly take in. There's this whole world of expression and meaning there. But when thinking, I think you're putting stuff in as you take stuff out. While feeling can be a pure withdrawal, if that makes sense. What do you think about that?

Stephen: No, this does make sense to me. I mean, as I consider the response I shared before, thinking about it more in this context, it's clear how feeling, like thinking, can be a blinder. Any of the filters, by focusing on one of them, you're closing your aperture to some others. And I think about this martial art philosopher, Yagyu Munenori, who, he talked about, essentially, don't watch the enemy's sword because that's a fixation. And fixation is blindness. So it's like, if you watch the thing that could kill you, you will be blind to the thing that will kill you, is kind of the idea. But I think there's a relevant application here with music that, if as much as I love just to be feeling too, going back to my practice room experiences if I was just feeling in the practice room again, little wonder why I didn't get great. I didn't get super good at hearing when I was a little out of tune and fixing stuff and similar things like if you're in an ensemble and you're just feeling all the time. There's some important listening you need to be able to do that is both critical and analytical to be a good ensemble participant. I primarily play an orchestra. I'm usually one of several or many violinists playing similar parts. It is not easy for any group in the world to get violins in sync–to get any instruments in sync, you know? So when you've got a bunch of them, it gets a little easier to mask the problems of slightly out of sync, but I've mostly played in smaller orchestras where there's, you know, maybe eight violinists, nine violinists, and when you're in a smaller group, it gets really obvious if you're not out of sync and if you're not listening to each other, if you are so swept up in feeling that, yeah, ensemble gets very hard. And then that, of course, creates all these potential obstacles for the people next to you to feel or to think about the things they should be, let alone for the audience who might hear, wow, the violins are playing three different rhythms. This is Mozart. That's probably not right. So, yeah, any of the filter could be blinding.

William: Yeah, it's true. I do feel like there's an exception to that. But it's a tricky exception, because it is restricting your vision in one way. But I feel like this is one of the best times to prioritize feeling in your listening is in initial listening and when you're using the exploratory filter. Because it's interesting, the exploratory filter, it's a feeling filter and I would describe it when you're using the exploratory filter, your goal is to feel everything.

And now because you're feeling everything, there are specifics that you don't get to engage with. Maybe things you'd really like, because you're too busy surveying the whole scene emotionally or viscerally.

And it's an incredible space to be in, but it's a really hard space for me to maintain because as soon as I take that bird's eye view and am taking in everything, there are so many things I want to engage with. I'm like, that's a really nice bassline. Or this is a really nice counter melody over here. And so you're losing the closeup when you're using the exploratory filter but you do get that big picture. And it's a filter that I feel like I haven't had explained to me. I feel like most training on listening is about going deep, going to that narrow view. And so I wanted to give a shout out to the exploratory filter as just taking that bird's eye view, trying to take in and feel literally everything, which especially in big orchestral works is really hard, but I mean, it's an indescribable feeling once you can tap into that space. 

Stephen: Yeah, I mean, the first thing that it made me think of actually is this listening experience I had the first time I remember consciously listening to Chopin's second ballade, which I know you're familiar with. I'm not a huge fan of the ballade, but the ending of the second really excites me. And I was listening to this performance. There's this part where essentially you have in the right hand a melody, at the bottom of the right hand, and a repeated note at the top of the right hand. And so I’m listening to this and I'm just trying to have a good time with Chopin and then all of a sudden it became crystal clear to me, whoa, this pianist made the inside voice louder than the outside voice while he's playing these fast repeated notes and he was hammering on the piano with incredible punch and so the technique made me, I literally had a tear come to my eye as I was thinking about technique for an instrument that's not even my instrument really. And it's like, wait a second, I was listening at this macro view and all of a sudden I'm at this super micro view just thinking the inner voice louder than the outer voice. And then before I knew it, I was back at this macro view and it was mind-boggling to me when I reflected on it and I went back and listened to the piece again, still really appreciated the piece, but this only happened once where I had this emotional response that felt like it was very much like watching the Olympics. It's like, what an athlete who can do this thing. And so yeah, when you think about the exploratory filter and your ability trying to take something in, I feel like the beauty is that you might, well, this is going to take me back to poetry. You might wander into a field of daffodils, to quote Wordsworth. You're just going along and you think you're exploring and then suddenly you find something. Like, that's when it gets really amazing. And the finding, I think, is always gonna be the zooming into something. Less of a macro view. So, yeah, if that's your experience, you're exploring and then suddenly you find yourself not in the macro view anymore because you found something. I think that's a win.

William: But it's funny, I feel like the macro view is the best gateway to those discoveries.

Stephen: Another paradox.

William: I had this experience listening to Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun where the first time I heard the piece I'm like, wow, that's cool. And I've always had this thought. It's like, I wish I could hear it again for the first time. That would be so magical. And then you go back to the piece, and I'm an academic musician. I like to zoom in and I get a lot out of it. And so I did that a lot.

And then one day I was like, can I take a macro view and just pretend like I don't know the piece at all? And I really found that exploratory space and it was like hearing it for the first time. I was emotionally speaking, swept off my feet at one part. My brain knew it was coming, but my feelings didn't when I was in that macro view and I had this experience that I haven't been able to forget. I've been trying to replicate it through that same pattern and have gotten close, but it's just interesting.

Stephen: No, and it's amazing when, I mean, we're both describing experiences with recorded music, right? Not live performances.

William: Mm-hmm. That was going to be my next point is how listening varies in live performance versus recording. Because recordings give you the opportunity to practice listening in ways that live music doesn't. If you're there, you wanna be there. If you find that passage in Chopin's second ballade that you wanna really analyze what happens, you can go back ten seconds and listen to it again and nerd out about it. Not an option in live performance.

Stephen: For any of you who get a lot of your music on YouTube, which is where I still get a ton of my music, they now have those little features where they show the most replayed parts of a video, and sometimes I'm listening to a track that isn't, you know, super well known, super out there, not a lot of views, and I'm like, that's probably my most replayed, because I love to go back to this little clip where suddenly you have 11 trumpet parts on top of each other, or suddenly you have some weird chord. So yeah, there is something there with recorded music that gives you a different type of experience that is not available in live music. But I think live exploration is particularly exciting–exploring music you've never heard when you hear it in a live performance. I certainly have had experiences where I heard live music including music that I eventually came to enjoy and didn't really care about at the time, you know? But then there are other experiences where a live performance overcame negative preconceptions I had about a piece. So for instance, one of my most dominant music memories of all music memories is hearing Short Ride in a Fast Machine live, happened to be conducted by our father, which adds an extra level of emotional engagement for me. But I went in with a slightly negative perception. I really love minimalistic music–about 60% of it. I don't like Philip Glass. I don't really like Terry Riley. And so I knew John Adams was coming later than this. And I knew people who didn't like this piece, including people within our own family.

And I was like, okay, this will be interesting. We just listened to Elgar's Enigma Variations, which I love. And I'm like, okay, great. Now we'll hear something else, you know? And then this piece begins and I was just floored from start to finish. You know, it's a short piece hence the title. The live performance was so stunning. To me that it overcame these negative preconceptions I had and it immediately became on my list of probably top 10 favorite orchestral works of any time period. There is something in a live performance that I don't think would have happened if I had listened to it on a recording first. Whether because I knew this was a really hard piece from listening to it live, I knew that this was this group was really stretching themselves, the group that was performing it, things like that, that wouldn't have been present if I just listened to a Chicago Symphony recording or something like that. Live music has a power that is different.

William: I think that that power is really inviting to exploration both as performers and as listeners because you see so many performers who, in the moment, in the performance, I mean especially being at the piano behind a lot of these performers you just see it's like whoa we've never done that before, but I like it–that was really good. And I feel like listening in an exploratory way is such a key to tapping the potential of live performance. I think it's rather silly to practice something and get it pristine, especially in an age of recording, and then be like, now I'm gonna go out on stage and present that thing exactly. Maybe there are moments you want to do that in, but there's so much to explore. There's so much that the space, the audience, the music will give back to you if you're listening, and especially if you're listening in an exploratory sense. The music will tell you what to do. And it's kind of a dangerous thing to give yourself to exploration. I've been burned by that more than once, where I really start to feel the music, and then I lose control a bit. But I also never forget those moments and I think I made the moments before that little loss of control or after really really stellar because I was there I was right there with the music. I was there in the room with the people and the ether, whatever you want to call it. Something told me this is what you need to do and listening especially in an exploratory way was and is such a consistent gateway to those types of moments, for me at least.

Stephen: This makes me think back to what we were talking about about choices before, increasing your choices. It's like if you practice a piece to where you can play it without any detectable flaws–if you're looking at it through a critical filter–all of a sudden you have these choices that are available to you. Now you can choose, do I want to play it exactly that way? You know, when you've done your scale correctly 8,000 times, you start to have these choices about using it correctly and in the performance environment. And similar thing as a listener. When you've practiced listening and engaging with music in all these ways, it just gives you new choices to let go of one filter, to choose and invest energy in another one, or to try actively to combine them, which I think is incredibly hard to do, to try to do two at once, but certainly doable.

William: Yeah, I was thinking of Hilary Hahn talking about her choices in intonation. It's like, I want this to be slightly sharp and then right in tune and then slightly sharp again. Obviously having that technique down and then just choosing very intentionally what she did with it. But I guess the last–go ahead.

Stephen: I was going to say, one of the interesting cases in violin is Jascha Heifetz, who is largely regarded as the best technique. Some people say Paganini might have had better technique. I seriously doubt it. Having heard Heifetz play, not like I heard him live, having his recordings, it is hard to fathom any other violinist having superior technique in a lot of different ways, particularly when it comes to intonation and bowing accuracy. But Heifetz oftentimes makes stuff up. He just plays the wrong notes. And it's very clear that he did it on purpose. He's like, everybody else ends the scale on a B flat. I'm going to end it on a D and then come back down. Just like Paganini saying, OK, maybe I do indeed break my string. And some people might think that it's a mistake, but it's on purpose. Like, Heifetz would do some stuff like that sometimes, even in recordings, where he's just not playing the actual written notes. And it's wonderful. And he has the technique to make it doable. And it does give an ethos that, you know, you can forgive more things that a purist might not, because you know, he could have played it that way. He could have played it exactly as written in terms of actual notes or rhythms or whatnot. So choices. Choices that just become available when you have practiced.

William: That ties into the last question, which is this. How would you describe an optimal balance between the feeling and thinking filters in listening?

Stephen: I think this is the hardest to answer of all. To me the optimal balance is like a left hand and right hand–that it's fine for one of them to be dominant but the preferable thing to me is that neither of them is out of reach or unavailable. If my right hand is busy holding my cup of water I can reach out with my left and grab something else, right? Or vice versa. That to me is the optimal balance, is that both are always available because then you have the choice to use one or the other.

William: Right. For me, one of the words that I really like when I think about combining these two is the word “play” because you think about the game you like most, whether it's a board game, a video game, a sport, you invest so much into it and you step onto a sports field or set up the game, go to your computer and you're ready to invest everything into this game, to play this game. And the game can make you so happy, it can make you so upset, but at the end of the day it's a game. So there's this low pressure atmosphere where you're fully invested, but it's just a game. And I like to approach listening that way because you can be, in the words of my teacher at TCU, Dr. Bukhman, you can be “carefree but precise” in your listening when it's just about playing. You're playing with the music, how you take it in. I love that attitude because it gives space for all the investment you want, all the investment you can put into chess. And it also creates room to take out all the enjoyment you could from, I don't know, a Final Fantasy game. I just like that idea so much in performance. But listening, I feel like, needs to be a bigger part of performance. So I think it fully applies to listening as well.

Stephen: Yeah, if I can end with yet another reference to English. One of the most interesting articles I read on writing theory is the compositional theory that essentially reading is an act of writing. Reading is a compositional act. And the idea here is, you write something down, you put it on paper. Sort of the philosophical question, if it's just sitting there and nobody reads it, does it exist? Is it doing anything? It's just sitting there. And then somebody comes along and reads it and thoughts are happening and something is changing in the world because the audience is engaging with something that is written. Music's a little different where of course, even if there's no audience but the performer, they're still putting sound out into the world. All that stuff is different, you know.

But I do think there's a parallel with music of the audience members creating something by listening, which is really exciting as a prospect to me that by listening, I am creating some kind of experience. And I completely believe that that is part of what the performers, most performers, will experience too is they'll perform differently if there's an audience there. They will feel differently in their stomachs and their sweaty palms if there's an audience there.

But similar thing with the audience engaging that if you go and listen as if you were creating the music with a consciousness of I am causing something by listening, that's a way to hopefully get unstuck and open up new choices.

William: I believe it was Walt Whitman who said to have great art, you need great audiences. And it's such a tight relationship. And one that's very different than it used to be, which I think puts extra emphasis on listening and its importance. So I have one last theory that I guess ties in a little bit with my “play” being this idea that combines all the thinking and all the feeling in a nice carefree way. It's a bit of a theory that I think is related and it starts with a story.

So last summer I played a wedding gig and I played two pieces. I played the processional and a song right after or during the ceremony. I think it was during the ceremony. And when I played the processional, I did it just right. I cadenced at exactly the right time. And it was this lovely moment where the bride, I literally like finished the piece right as she took her last step in front of the groom and the preacher. And I thought to myself, you know, that's really fun to have a space like music where I can do something exactly right. And that's a hard goal to have, especially if it's a constant goal to do something perfectly.

But in that moment, I felt like I had succeeded. And I succeeded, I would say, through listening and observing. I knew what to do in the music because I was listening to that as I observed what was going on. And so I'm curious what you think of just that idea. It's a little bit of a tangent, but as music or art as a space to do something perfectly.

Stephen: That is a really interesting question. I would wager that for every performer who believes they've done something perfectly, there will be audience members who disagree. And I think that's okay. Or co-performers who disagree. And I think that's okay too. But, I don't know, this might be an example of play. You and I have talked before about performances that were clearly not perfect from a critical standpoint. Parts not in harmony, parts out of tune, wrong notes played according to the score provided by the composer, and yet people can have a transcendent experience in those performances all the same. So yeah, I believe there's potential for just about anything to be felt as perfect. This is difficult for me when I keep thinking to–as a string player there's potential for every note to be in tune perfectly. That means there's potential for every note to be out of tune. Which of course there is on the piano as well, of course there is on any instrument. But yeah, when I think about other media, other types of art as well, it all feels really contextual. Is it perfect for the context in which it's happening, the time in which it's happening? Even art that isn't technically time-bound, like visual art. So, I don't know. I don't know if I have anything insightful to add on this, but my clearest takeaway is that the audience, whoever the audience is, whether the audience is the performer or someone else, they will determine, most of all, if it's perfect.

And if it feels perfect to the performer, that to me feels like they are being able to live in an audience-like role in that case, which I think is great. I think if everybody performed as if they were a member of the audience, that we'd have a lot fewer musicians who are tired of performing.

William: Well, and I love that idea that to make a performance perfect requires intentionality and or engagement from the audience. That could be up to you. Perhaps that's part of your choice by your listening, to make this concert, this recital, this listening experience perfect. And I especially like the idea that listeners are not exempt from that. They have that relationship with the performer. So thanks for listening, everyone. Thanks for your time, Stephen. Really appreciate it.

Stephen: Yes, glad to be here and ramble about poetry.

William: It’s very good. If you'd like more content about listening, please sign up for our newsletter, check out the website, the links will be in the show notes. We'll catch you at the next episode.

Stephen Taylor is a writer and violinist. See more of his work at his website: https://stephenjtaylor.com/

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