Listening with the Body

When I watch a dance performance, I follow the dancer’s movement by twitching my muscles to mimick the dancer but without moving my limbs so as not to  disturb my fellow viewers.  In other words, I watch not just with my eyes but with my whole body.  

Similarly, when I attend a live music performance, I also work my muscles and thus listen to the music with my whole body, not just with my ears, as the performing musicians obviously do, too; I follow them in their bodily movements as I do when I watch dancers. 

It is not uncommon today among those who claim to love music to listen to the recorded or broadcast music while being engaged in a task of one sort of another — writing, reading, painting, cooking, doing whatever chores being done.  I do, too, sometimes when I have the radio on and music happens to be playing.  But when I put on a CD, I have to sit and follow the music with full attention, for only then I can say that the music was listened to, not just heard.  It should not be surprisingly, then, that I consider attending a live performance with its visual componens the only valid way of listening to music; recorded music is a partial realization, as a photographic reproduction of a painting is to the painting itself.  Once we learn to listen to music fully with our whole body, it becomes hard to just let it be heard aurally.  It always amazes me at concerts that the audience almost invariably sit tight with their head fixed straight as though in a church. I cannot help moving my head slightly to focus on the changing sources of the sound, strings here, winds here, and percussion over there, and discreetly move my right hand with the bowing hand of string players as I once played violin as a child and cello later.   As I listen, I become partially a participant in the performance.  Participatory listening is more natural to jazz than to classic music; and yet, even at jazz clubs, I notice in amazement that the audience for the most part sit perfectly still.  Yes, there are some who get up and dance in total participation. 

It is well to remember that until the rise of radio broadcasting at the end of the 19th century, music was exclusively live.  It could be heard in a concert hall or in private homes, customarily chamber music literally.  Live broadcast, incidentally, a curious contradiction in terms; isn’t it more accurate to say simultaneous broadcast?

I think we can say the same thing to some extent with talks, lectures, and discussions; when we listen, totally absorbed in what is being said, as we watch the speaker and her/his gesticulations, we also respond with our whole body and the substance of the talk registers more firmly in our mind.  This argues strongly for the value of live classroom learning. 

This argues strongly for the value of live classroom learning.  From the teaching side of the fence, I argue that professors who read from their notes fail to understand the significance of the bodily communication with the students by which the importance of bodily listening can only be taught and understood.

08.25.19