Looking While Listening

Listening to music in the concert hall is different from listening at home on the radio or CD, and the difference is obviously vast.  Given the high quality of sound recording today, the CD delivers clarity and purity of musical sound, and we can concentrate more intensely on the music than in the public hall which is never free of incidental and sometimes intrusive noise.  On the other hand, seeing the musicians produce their music is an enriching experience missed in the CD music.  I am always intrigued by sighting the source of sound from different instruments in the different parts of the orchestra (or from the four instruments in a quartet).  I enjoy no less watching the different techniques, say, in bowing, like legato, spiccato, jetée, and arpeggio, not to speak of the wide variety of instruments handled by the percussionist.  The soloist’s bodily choreography, which may bother some serious listeners as a distraction, fascinates me, too.  Music in a concert hall is a visual performance no less than an aural one, a theater in its own right.  The wooden block hit with a mallet near the end of Mahler’s Symphony #6 is some spectacle.  In order to absorb all the visual spectacles, I find myself looking left and right during the performance.  The curious and disconcerting thing is that no one else does that; I see rows of heads in front of me (and I generally prefer to sit in the rear part of the hall for a better mix of sounds), and they are all perfectly still looking straight ahead.  Some of the members of the audience undoubtedly quietly tap their fingers or feet with the music but I have never seen a head looking left and right. I wonder if my head movement distract or even offend my fellow listeners behind me.  I wonder, too, if a concentrated listening naturally suppresses visual observation.  Even at a concert of avant-garde, experimental music, in which traditional instruments are subjected to wild handling, like bowing on the string below the bridge, rolling an iron chain on the drum, and washing pebbles in a fish bowl, the listeners don’t seem to be looking. But for me the worth of attending a concert is the experience of looking while listening, of hearing and watching the music as it is created.  For intense listening, I stay home and put on a CD.