Ear
I mentioned briefly in my last post that I’ve been trying to listen more. I used to spend a lot of time sitting, staring and listening. I’ve always thought that whilst sitting in a room or on a park bench you can hear the most beautiful music all around you. Sometimes it might be abstract and others there might be some kind of natural rhythm running through it. Whilst holding workshops I sometimes ask the classes to put down their instruments and just sit and listen to the sounds. Simple things like air conditioning can become very interesting when combined with other sounds. The other week I was teaching at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and I ask the class to sit and listen to what was going on. We heard a duet between an opera singer (in one room) and a sax in another. This combined with chairs scraping along the floor in the building and the sound of the outside world made it very interesting.
Of late though I’ve found I’ve stopped doing this (children, work, etc etc etc) and I want to start again. That is listening to everything. I want to sit on the parch bench but also on the couch listening to CDs.
Lately with CDs I have time to listen once and then move on. This is not fair to the artist. This is defeating the process of a musician making a CD. There is no way I can understand what the musician was thinking when collecting the tracks, rehearsing and putting them into the final track order on the CD. Listening to a music should be an experience. This is one of the reasons I’m not really into downloads. They breakup the artist process. Surely track 5 on an album is that for a reason. I don’t like ‘shuffle play’ either as you can imagine.
Are downloads killing the artistic process of the album or are musicians having to work harder to provide perfect one-off tracks? A question for another time…
Wish me luck. I’m now off to savour the sounds of the local indian restaurant…
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