Listening is a magnetic & strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold & expand.
Karl Menninger
Listening is an activity that connects us deeply to others. It can change how we perceive the world, & then, how we decide to live in it.
To listen suggests an open, receptive stance, without necessarily knowing what will arrive. Its suggests alertness, willingness. Listening is essentially an act of respect & generosity. It is a time for keeping our egos quiet, for hearing others' needs & opinions. Many of the great leaders of historical & contemporary times, the visionaries, the peacemakers, the activists & healers, are essentially good listeners. A great leader has an ability to listen acutely to the concerns of their era, to imagine what might be possible, & to bring that to life. It's interesting to think about what that could mean for the role of musicians in society now.
Musicians are consummate listeners. Our attentiveness is a gift, with potentially broad-reaching applications. I would love musicians to realise that we have skills that go way beyond the specifics of our craft as instrumentalists, composers, researchers, programmers, therapists, funders, managers, critics, teachers, administrators, broadcasters, producers - whatever our musical practice is. Listening with care, hearing complexity, & noticing subtlety need not be purely professional music practices, but tenets for living. Such listening has radical potential.
I've titled this talk Learning to Listen because I think listening is what music uniquely offers - a space to encounter, to experience, to extend our thinking & imagination...What you'll hear from me is, at its core, a practitioner's musings, a series of reflections, interlaced with music. The thread that binds the parts is my imagination of the spirit of Peggy Glanville-Hicks. A spirit urging us to be daring, to act with integrity, to imagine what's possible, & to work hard to create it, to be passionate & unstinting in our support of one another, & of music. In the words of Winston Churchill:
Courage is what it takes to stand up & speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down & listen.
MUSIC: Footprint (Elena Kats-Chernin)
I am a recorder player, & my instrument exists on the fringe of western classical repertoire. I have, at best, a fleeting cameo in the grand scheme of that history. I love this position. It gives me great freedom. The reality of being a recorder player based in Australia is that there is no ready-made job for me here as a performing musician. Nothing exists unless, together with others, we create it. My work is to invent possibilities, contexts & audiences for the music, people & ideas I'm passionate about. It's a privileged way to live.
Debates rage, & have for countless generations, in many cultures, as to whether our energies are best spent preserving old traditions, adapting them for changing times, or making new ones.
For artists, these questions arise daily. The very substance of our lives is shaped around a complex dance with the past, a desire to articulate our now, & our imagination of possible futures.
Margaret Atwood makes the following comment:
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured & held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending on how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it's useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living & allowed to enter time once more - which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.
Nowadays, most of the music I play comes from the present, from my desire to enter Atwood's 'realm of change' with an audience. I work a lot with composers, which in essence means putting my recorders & my self into a series of laboratories, endlessly testing & redefining limits.
Sometimes composers ask me to produce sounds I thought the recorder couldn't make. Trying to find them is like being an inventor. It's about lateral thinking, endless patience, endless listening, horrible stubbornness, & sometimes, a fleeting 'Hang on, what if...?' that spins everything on its head & crashes me unsteadily through to a new place. Thanks to my marvellous composer colleagues pushing my ears, my imagination, my technique, where I land is somewhere unexplored, & suddenly, my instrument & I take on new dimensions. It's one of my favourite parts of being a musician.
Playing the premiere of a piece is a living-on-your-nerves experience. It comes with a dreadful responsibility, or so it can feel. It's hard not to see this creation as a child, trusted to my care. I know that in the sweep of history, the person who plays the premiere is irrelevant - what matters is that the piece comes into the world, to begin its journey of travelling through time into other hands, other ears, other contexts. But at the moment of its birth, I can't help feeling as though i have a role in its delivery. That makes for an intense bond...
