Listen and Learn

First posted Mar 14th, 2012 by newpiper


There are different ways of knowing something – you can know something intellectually, but that isn't the same as knowing it experientially. So we understand exactly what someone means when they plunge into the sea and say “this water’s cold!” but it isn't until we plunge in ourselves that we really understand what it means for water to be cold. Sometimes it’s not experience so much as extra background knowledge. I find this most with words. I will know what a word means, know how to interpret it when I read or hear it, and I know how to use it, but then I will quite suddenly become aware of its etymology and it feel as though I have an extra level of understanding, of the real essence of the word and why it means what it means.


Which is all a way of saying that I am currently undergoing this extra layer understanding – both experiential and whatever the etymological would be called – around music. So of course I know that in order to recall, memorise and play, a tune I need to listen to it, but I am only just understanding what “listen” actually means. 

Like the rest of the folk world, it seems, I've been listening to the many variations and performances of the Halsway Schottische, which I came across at the Scandi Session. The tune is going around in my head so naturally I'm starting to wonder if I could have a go at playing it. But in order to have bits of it going round and to hum odd fragments I need only that first layer of listening or understanding - a sort of passive listening.

 There are bits of the tune I am quite clear on, and bits that I gloss over. But if I put that together with my new understanding of the patterns in music I can start to listen actively to the right parts. I know there is a repeated refrain, and that the refrain has minor variations, so I can now listen asking myself, how is this repeat different from that repeat? How does it move from repeat mode into a new phrase? How are those phrases linked?


In a way it’s mad not to have noticed this before as it’s roughly the same as the close reading I do as an Eng Lit sort of person. Where others see that a character in a book got up their nose, or that the ending was quite sad, I see that the references to a particular colour throughout the novel is linked to a certain mood, or that one character mirrors another moral terms. Others read passively, I read actively. I have always listened to music as something outside of me, that washes over me and engages me entirely emotionally, but I've never actively listened, partly because I don’t want to spoil the emotions with technical issues. But now I see that like close reading active listening will only enhance my enjoyment.


And can I play the Halsway Schottische? Watch this space, but first I need to listen some more.