"Seeing is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to think... a large part of seeing depends on habit and convention." John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
Of the overwhelming number of comments on my last post, most wisely suggested that I should start by making an initial connection, a bridge between me and each alien composition I face. Joining a choir, following along with the sheet music, or asking for to a grandparent's favourites... it struck me that what we're really discussing is ways of listening. And, ultimately, whether we have lost our way from the art of listening.
So for this post, I thought I would do some time travelling back to moments when I have forged lifetime connections with a piece of music, to dissect the special nature of those listening experiences.
Music is like that, isn't it? Everyone has a song or three that sent a thunderbolt through them as soon as they heard it. From that point on it contributes to a living soundtrack to our lives: the beat to summon on a long run, or the lyrics to mutter in a traffic jam...
It happened to me at 11, cross-legged on my single bed, listening to Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone on a borrowed cassette. (A brief aside: this blog will only work if I'm entirely honest, admitting to 'mainstream' tastes or to liking 'low-brow' classical music should that prove the case. Don't get narky. It'll only frighten me off further and confirm my fears of classical's snooty scene).
What was it about the song that electrified me and still does? It didn't feel comfortable, being electrified, but it was intensely enlivening. It heightened my senses. From the moment I pressed play, things were hurling violently towards me. Piano keys pounded, words spat out: tramps, money, class, an accusatory "Didn't you?" aimed square at me in the first 15 seconds. It forced me to question my place in a rotten world in a way that words unaccompanied by music could not have done: "how does it feel?"
I'd also never know music to concertina out through time and space all at once: memoir, folklore (jugglers and clowns, princesses in steeples), social history (the 60s protest movement)... Yet always that direct message to me again: 'how does it feel?'
All of which leads me to the above clip of Stephen Fry defending the relevance of classical music.
What struck me was the bit about the concerto, which he helpfully explains is a piece of music in which a solo instrument contends with a full orchestra. He suggests a way of listening to any concerto: as an argument between an individual and the state. "It is an individual voice, crying out and trying to make a statement of some kind. And it's often drowned out by the orchestra and it fights back, and the orchestra fights back, and it fights back... And the dynamic of listening to that is like nothing on earth... It blows your mind."
Doesn't that sound like Like a Rolling Stone? An individual voice, fighting against a malign culture? So here goes... my listening experiment, without recourse to Wikipedia searches or blurb (which would spoil the whole listening experiment, wouldn't it?)