One of the books I've got on the go at the moment is "The Cloud of Unknowing", a fourteenth century treatise on contemplation as the route to the divine. One of the things that has struck me about it so far is the author's insistence that God cannot be known through the intellect or through the senses, but only through meditation, rooted in love. This almost feels like a zen-type approach, with the 'active' mind switched off so as to free yourself from the distraction of the uncontrolled torrents of conscious thought. It's only by sidling up to the transcendent God, as you mosey around in the cloud of unknowing, that you can happen upon those moments of divine clarity and insight.
Anyway, this started me thinking about music. Specifically, how we come to music when we are young, before any 'contamination' of our innocent ear has taken place - that is, before we know what individual instruments are, before we can identify each instrument's voice, and before we have any sense of genre, form, or convention.
At this stage in our development, we must be responding in the purely sensory and emotional modes: it makes us feel good or bad, depending on certain characteristics of the music: rhythm, melody, timbre, harmony and so on. But as young children we have no idea about what those things *are*, only that this thing - this noise,these voices amongst the noise - make us feel something that we like or dislike. Hence we like to repeat those experiences - so we say 'Again! Again!' once we can talk. I have a hazy sense that while this is going on we're starting to wire in connections between the auditory cortex (if there is such a thing) and the channels and circuits of pain and pleasure. Certain pathways are being reinforced within and between these parallel systems, bonding together the sensory and emotional response patterns.
Later, we start to learn technical things: what instruments are, what they're made of, and how they are played, strummed, struck or caressed. We learn that there are genres of music, stratified by age and future, and that there's stuff that it's ok to like, and there's stuff that we *shouldn't* like. Because...
And perhaps we start to specialise. And we start to listen in a different way...for the lyrical content, and the way that it carries or invokes complex clusters of political, cultural or emotional elements. Or we might start to analyse the music in terms of how it compares with other versions of the same thing, how the players emphasise this element or that,this tempo or that one, and on and on to the tiniest nuance.
And in the end we might just be listening with the intellect so intensely that we forget to hear and to feel simultaneously. I know I have felt like this sometimes in a concert hall: that I am listening to the technical execution of the piece, listening for a flaw or trying to follow an individual instrument's voice, and on such occasions I have realised that I'm hardly listening to the music at all, but rather analysing the performance.
I would like to try and get back to listening with a more innocent ear. At the end of a recent performance of the Britten War Requiem, I said to my mate, "I don't have words to describe that." And in a way I think that's how it should be.
