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

Lecture Performed Socratically

In a New York Times Sunday Review (17 October 2015, “Lecture Me.  Really.”), Molly Worthen debated on the importance of the lecture as a teaching format as opposed to the group discussion.  It prompted me to think more about lecture as teaching. 

 It is true that a good lecture, well delivered, teaches students not only to listen actively but also to organize thoughts efficiently, much better than a group discussion. She fully recognizes, too, that the key to a good lecture is delivery; she writes that she rehearses the detailed script thoroughly and know it “well enough to riff when inspiration strikes,” and does “pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions.”   In short, a good lecture is a performance.  This does not mean mere histrionics.  A good lecturer must know how to edit the complex material so as to facilitate the aural reception and realize it into a well-articulated oral presentation such that the argument is crystal clear; the lecturer must learn to be a playwright and then an able performer.  A scholarly article published in print is fine for sight reading but not for lecturing; boring professors are those who fail to understand this fact and read their text, adhering to the Old French etymology of the word lecture, which indeed means reading, and they give the lecture format a bad name as a teaching method.  Then, too, there are students who assiduously take notes verbatim, hearing and recording the words and letting the sense of the lecture slip by until comes the time to read their notes for the exam.  A lecture, simply read aloud, might as well be distributed in print to be read individually at leisure. 

The importance of this distinction between lecture as reading and lecture as performance was not sufficiently made clear by the author of the Sunday review.  Lectures read aloud do not teach listening; only lectures well performed teaches listening attentively and successfully transmits the art of argumentation and solid thinking. 

I claim that the best teaching occurs in a Socratic dialogue, ideally one on one, in a sequence of question and answer.  In this situation, the teacher has the luxury of knowing more precisely what the student knows and does not know, what she or he understood or failed to understand, and thus what can be skipped and what reinforced, proceeding thus step by step with maximum efficiency. The seminar with a group of students is a guided discussion as we find in Plato’s all-night Symposium.  A successful seminar therefore has the professor playing the role of Socrates, who guides and oversee the discussion, challenging the class, as a well-focused multiple-channel dialogue such that a student-led discussion can achieve only sporadically.  With an audience larger than can be managed in a seminar format we compromise and shift the weight from the group discussion to the professor’s lecture but without losing the benefit of teaching by dialogue, if the lecturer learns to address the class collectively and severally.  This is what many good lecturers know almost instinctively or else by effort; there are inevitably professors who never seem to learn it.   A good storyteller can make any story engaging and persuades the audience to listen.  Lecture as performance does the same.  I say that it must be designed and delivered Socratically.  

Teaching Adults

Good teaching is not only a matter of the substance of the subject taught. Equally crucial is the pedagogics -- the way the material is dispensed and delivered. In order to assure that the material dispensed is efficiently received and absorbed by the students, it is essential that the teacher recognizes their character. The best teaching situation is therefore the Socratic method, and the ideal format is one-on-one dialogue. The teacher adjusts the material according to the capacity and propensity of the student and makes sure step by step that what has been said was fully understood. The principle applies to teaching a group, large or small. The teacher must reorganize the material and rethink its delivery whether the class is a group of mechanics, ballet dancers, school teachers, or the mixed audience. The teacher's task become more complex and challenging with a heterogeneous group. Teaching a class of college students is one thing; teaching a group of adults is another. Moreover, adult learners, even those uninitiated in the subject taught, are much more experienced in all aspects of life, more broadly read in various subjects, and more eager to learn. Replicating the college class lectures may be adequate for a course taught in a LifeLong Learning Program; but a pedagogic reconstruction is essential for the teaching to be better than adequate. So I think, and that's what I do.

Visual Text

Art History teaches works of art. In teaching art history, objects constitute the text. Those in the humanities who teach literary texts don't readily understand this elementary fact; some are incredibly dim-witted about it. Students studying Dickens are expected to come to class having read the assigned novel, and the professor gives them her ”explication de texte” consisting of the work's historical context and the diverse interpretations based on secondary sources. With older literature like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Beowulf, and foreign literature in the original, the professor will have to go over the primary text together with the students first. Students studying works of art, left on their own, can get little beyond its general impression, something comparable to the summary plot of the assigned book. Literary material in art history is exclusively secondary sources, and close reading of the visual text -- objects -- must precede the critical discussion. Work in the art history class, therefore, compresses the exegesis of the visual text with that of the interpretive texts much more than is the general practice in literary courses. Relevant secondary sources are accordingly more effectively assigned after the particular work had been dealt with in the class. There are still such incurable idiots who think showing slides with a running commentary constitutes art history.

Back to Teaching

When I retired from teaching at Swarthmore College in 2001, I meant retirement in no uncertain terms. Unlike some of my colleagues who retire in steps by teaching part-time for a few years and then one course now and then before quitting completely, I quit cold turkey. I broke my vow in 2005, however, at the request of a good friend, and taught a course on Michelangelo at the American Ballet Theatre in the Extension Program of the Long Island University. In the meantime, since 2001, I have been under pressure to contribute to Swarthmore's LifeLong Learning Program given in New York. I resisted. But last summer, having given up the house in Swarthmore and moved to my pied-a-terre in New York full-time, I capitulated and agreed to do a course on Michelangelo. So, I start teaching on 18 January, once a week, from 6:45 to 9:15 p.m. My primary concern: when am I going to have dinner?