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The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening

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I read in this week’s Brain Pickings newsletter that the composer Aaron Copland, in his book Music and Imagination, says listening to music is an art, just as playing it is. 

If that’s the case, then I practice the art every time I walk. 

This morning, fresh from reading about Copland, the “Overture to Die Meistersinger” in my ears, I thought about how I listen. It’s mostly with the ear of an amateur, someone whose love for music greatly exceeds her knowledge of it. 

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it; perhaps I enjoy it more. 

“There are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one
can recognize beauty when one comes upon it… ” Copland writes. “Recognizing the beautiful
in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat of a minor miracle.”

Streaming

Streaming

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Today I walked to Gabrieli, yesterday to Vivaldi, and the day before, Joni Mitchell. All of this from the music streaming service that began as a free six-month trial but I decided was worth paying for. 

Though old news for many, the idea that I can call up most any piece of music struck me like a thunderclap. It was out there waiting but I had to be ready for it, ready to see music as something to rent and not to own.

Which is not to say I have entirely given up that concept. I still have stacks of CDs and LPs, still have my trusty iPod, tiny and ancient, with playlists that have embedded themselves in my brain. 

But now I also have my phone, gateway to the streaming app — and a musical freedom I am only beginning to plumb. 

The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending

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I was lucky to find early in my life the twin passions that drive it still. One is words, the other is music. I’ve made my living from the first and kept the second for pleasure. For that reason, music has been the great unexplored ocean — restless, deep and ever-changing. 

This morning for some reason I hankered to hear the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thanks to the streaming service I had free for six months and decided I must keep, his pieces were at my fingertips. 

My walk began with Overture to the Wasps, which after a buzzing start, settles into a brisk march and then a shimmering serenade. 

I listened to The English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on Greensleeves, and then… The Lark Ascending. It’s this last one that I can’t get out of my mind, so much so that I came home and started playing it on my computer. The comments on the YouTube page — more than four thousand of them — speak to the power of this special piece and of music in general.

People write about emerging from depression after listening to The Lark, of saying goodbye to dying loved ones with this soaring melody. The piece harkens back to a simpler time, said many. One man wrote that it reminds him of his parents peddling through the English countryside during World War II, his father on leave from the RAF, the couple picnicking one golden afternoon. Life amidst the madness, ending somehow on a high note, despite it all.

Empty Tables

Empty Tables

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There’s a mournful tune from the musical Les Miserables, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” that describes the way I’m feeling about our bird feeder today, closed at the request of numerous local authorities in response to reports of sick and dying birds in the area.

Birds flock to feeders and spread the disease as they eat. Removing the feeders removes at least one source of contagion.

But it also removes the pushing and the preening, the darting and the chirping. It takes away the front row seat we have on avian life and the chaotic, swooping joy of it.

A downy woodpecker just landed, hopped on the deck railing, then flew away. A few minutes later, a confused chickadee perched on the bird feeder pole, gave a forlorn chirp, then zoomed off to a nearby azalea bush.

I know it’s for their own good,  but I miss the critters … and I like to think they’re missing us.

Seize the Day!

Seize the Day!

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Their sound holds within it the rattle of a snake and the swish of a beaded curtain. It has more crescendoes than a brass band on a June afternoon.

The cicadas have brought us quickly to the soul of summer.  They have taken us to the brink of that shimmering, simmering time of year when everything seems more intensely alive.

Yesterday, on the Glade Trail, I moved into and out of various cicada hot zones, places where the critters congregate more plentifully, where they sing their songs with more abandon than others. 

Maybe it’s because they prefer laying their eggs on these branches (in our backyard they seem to like the crepe myrtle more than the dogwood, for instance). Or maybe it’s for some other reason buried deep in the cicada psyche.

All I know is that seeing them mate and fly, hearing them shout and sing, knowing what I do of their lifespan and life story, leaves me with one urgent message: Carpe diem, folks, seize the day. 

Writing and Music

Writing and Music

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Having a piano I can actually play means that I’ve been digging into all sorts of old music. There’s Debussy’s Arabesque with its rolling arpeggios, Handel’s Passacaglia with its variations on a theme, a Chopin polonaise with its jaunty beat and Scott Joplin’s piano rags, just because.

But the most poignant find was the book of Brahms’ Intermezzos. How I loved those pieces when I last played piano seriously, and how playing them again brought back the self that played them then: young, dreamy, all of life ahead of her. 

I wasn’t sure what kind of life I wanted to have then, but I knew I wanted it to include writing and music. And now, all these years later, it does.

Farewell to the Spinet

Farewell to the Spinet

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When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I’ve heard described as “that great concert hall in the sky.”

I’d been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don’t know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Moonlight Sonata

Moonlight Sonata

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I learned from today’s Writer’s Almanac that Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was published on this day in 1802. This means that for 219 years young pianists — and those who live with them — have been tortured by this piece.

Even now, I can thrum the fingerings on the desk. The first few bars of the first movement of Moonlight Sonata along with the opening of Beethoven’s Fur Elise may well be the last knowledge to leave my brain. Yes, it’s that bad. 

I wore an aqua-colored dress with a white collar at the recital where I performed Moonlight Sonata. And I think I performed it relatively mistake-free. 

My teacher was unorthodox, so recitals were mercifully few and far between. But of the handful I had, on at least one or two occasions I had to start over when mistakes derailed me. 

Moonlight Sonata was not one of those times, though … because it was then and forever will be, embedded in my brain. 

(Title page of the first edition, courtesy Wikipedia)

The Soundtrack

The Soundtrack

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With slower walks closer to home, the soundtrack of the stroll grows in importance. Because as much as I would like to say that I walk in silence, the better to hear the faint voice of inspiration, I usually do not. In fact, the music often is the inspiration. At the very least, it’s the pace-setter.

Sometimes it’s Bach or Brahms or Dvorak coursing through my brain, and my cadence flows from the tempo of the movement, speedy during the prestos, slower for the adagios.  Other times, I play jazz or folk or show tunes; the latter have a lightheartedness especially appreciated these days. The soundtrack can be seasonal, too: Irish tunes are prepped and ready for next month. 

Music is a mood enhancer, amplifying good thoughts, soothing anxious ones. Often I come back in the house from an amble and keep the buds in my ears, finishing a movement or a song, prolonging the escape just a little longer. The soundtrack of the walk throws long shadows on the rest of the day.  

A Dog, a Pig and the Music

A Dog, a Pig and the Music

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It’s barely discernible but significant to me that at 5 p.m. there’s now enough light to play with Copper in the backyard. He enjoys it when I bounce on the trampoline, and one of the best ways I can think of to wind down the day is to close the computer, run outside and urge him to come with me so that I can watch him trot down the slight rise in the yard: his sturdy little legs, his mouth open with joy — or perhaps because he wants to bite me. 

Last evening I bounced to the last movement of the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, which I came to love after seeing the movie “Babe.” (The final theme of the symphony is the tune that rallies the little pig.) 

How lovely it is to bounce to that grand sound, looking up at the house, the windows dark in the room where I was just writing, so different from moving through the air, the glorious release of it all. And yet knowing that the experience of bouncing will come most alive for me when I try to get it down on the page. And that involves (you guessed it) … heading right back into that dark room.

(Photo: Universal Studios/Photofest and the Hollywood Reporter)