Part 8: What is Essential to Music?

Essentialism is the philosophy that everything has a core essence, or form, and without that core the thing would cease to be what it is. I believe that listening is essential to music–not performance, not music theory, not politics–just listening. Can you truly connect to music without listening? Can you connect to music without thinking or feeling something that results from the sonic presence of organized sound in time? The most famous deaf musician of all time, Beethoven, shared that even with impaired hearing, “art” was enough to keep him from total surrender to hopelessness and death. This had to be due in part to his exceptional ability to listen. 

Take away listening–our ability to determine what we hear–and what is music? It is nothing more than sonic propaganda/manipulation, where the performer, composer, or editor determines what we hear and how it makes us feel and think. If we take the opposite approach, and place listening at the center of music then we find an appropriate place for all music and ideologies pertaining to music, whether that be close to the center or on the fringes of effectiveness. 

When we take listening as the foundation for our musical approach we also come to understand the role of choice in listening. How you listen determines what you hear. Active listeners must choose how they listen. To actively listen means a choice is made to lay passive connection and actively seek something more through one of the four filters. When a given filter is selected a choice is made to set aside the offerings of the other filters, at least temporarily. These choices show the strength and flexibility of listening theory as it can accommodate multiple approaches to listening, showing which are the most effective and which can be set aside. Listening is essential to music, and choice is essential to active listening. Together, these two combine to offer an optimized connection to music.

This article is part eight of our series on listening theory. Stayed tuned for the final installment next week!