I’ve listened to a lot of music in my life. And I’ve studied guitar for years, taken classes as an undergrad, and have a master’s degree in music. But I don’t remember anyone teaching me how to listen.
That’s not entirely true. I had a wonderful course at Rutgers where the professor talked about listening. He interrogated our compositional ideas until we were down to first principles and realized we had none. He said he didn’t believe in boredom; boredom was just the lack of attention to your environment, and to illustrate he said he was waiting for the subway and listened and all he heard was the sound of the fluorescent lights and he thought about what the fundamental frequency was and what overtones there were.
But there’s a type of listening that happens in my head when I’m focused solely on the music, say, at classical concert or with the headphones on late at night. One way of hearing is to hear the parts. With orchestral music it’s obvious, the various sections play with or against each other.
I’ve done it here with a drone, but didn’t realize the effect until after I made it. There’s a few tracks of the main tone, somewhat high, around C3, which is the obvious focus. You can close your eyes and meditate to it. But then there’s something else happening deeper. Waves crashing on the shore? A voice? What is that down there? We can focus on that thing down there, or we can focus on the main tone. Or we can hear them as one. With a drone the music offers a lot of space for us to place our attention somewhere, then somewhere else, then back again. We are hearing the piece we create through our attention. Simple simple sounds, and the work is done inside of us, we create an experience that is the music.