LISTENING VS. HEARING

posted by James Reel

    Blogger Patricia Mitchell muses on the news item I linked to earlier about how people seem far more willing to listen to classical music in their cars than in the concert hall:

I would like their definition of "listening" because I suspect listening in a car isn't the same as listening at a concert, or at home when one puts in a CD, sits down, and does nothing but listen. I really don't think many people know how to listen these days. But I'm mean that way.

    She has an excellent point. At a classical concert, you’re expected to sit down, shut up, and pay attention, and I think that’s a good thing. If you’re not prepared to do that, you can get your classical kicks in many other ways. No need to turn every concert into a party. But neither can we expect real attentiveness from people who hear music in more casual, distracting settings.
    And that, responding to a little question Patty poses about my post, is why I don’t think it’s an absolutely horrible thing that there’s so little new music on classical radio. Much of it just doesn’t work on the air; a lot of it isn’t even effective on CD if you’re listening at home. Some is quite complex, and some is simply too quiet to muscle its way past the many distractions of home and car. It demands to be heard in concert. On the other hand, there’s a lot of music that’s been composed in the past, say, 20 years or so that would work splendidly on the radio, because it has some sort of immediacy that can grab your attention without the result of that attention being a desire to turn off the radio.
    Still, there are listeners (or should they be called hearers?) out there who complain bitterly when we play anything post-Brahms. Some people even complain about Samuel Barber, who’s almost as Romantic as you can get in a 20th-century idiom, even in his thornier works like his Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata. As Patty, an oboist, might point out, Barber was capable of writing some marvelously romantic melodies, and he assigned some of his greatest effusions for the oboe; consider his School for Scandal Overture, and the slow movements of his Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 1. (If Patty has any objection to Barber’s Piano Concerto, I suspect it’s that the traitor gave the big tune in the slow movement to the flute.)