Learn to listen

When it comes to experiencing music, I’m biased. That’s probably the case for all who are occupied with music for a living. Others are often shocked when I confess that I hardly ever listen to music. At times it overwhelms me, its length, its volume, its structure.

At the same time, I cannot possibly imagine life without music. It’s in me and around me, it’s constantly present. My mind goes on a continuous playback of whatever I recently played or heard. I think, I walk and I breathe in rhythms - and it’s not a metaphor, it’s a literal wiring of my brain, a tendency which often physically exhausts but is ruthlessly omnipresent in my daily life.

Still, I don’t think we talk about experiencing music quite enough. About the simple action of listening. Perhaps we’ve lost this ability in nowadays’ speed and pressure to create and display, often overweighing our capacity of absorption. Maybe it’s not trendy to listen anymore. To music, to others. Wouldn’t surprise me to see that yet another thing I, millennial, value as important, is already acclaimed passé.

Listening comes at a cost. (Not a shocker in a capitalist society, is it.) It takes effort to focus, and even more so to let go of analysing. I’ve been called naïve in the past. But it is exactly the submerging yourself in the experience, reclaiming the innocent naïveté of a newcomer that allows to be in the moment and listen anew, afresh. When you escape the structure of your own expectations towards what you hear, you are open for joy, pleasure, and revelation. Good music can give you good ideas, energy, or goosebumps, but very good music gives you feelings of hope, direction, clarity, motivation. And if hope dies last, isn’t it what matters most in life?

Learn to listen in order to hear.

(Originally posted on Instagram on 20.09.2022)

Many thanks to Ela Ziarnik for capturing a photo of me capturing a photo - just before we listened to a concert during the 2022 Montisi masterclass, which inspired us both for the months to come.