There are few life-skills as important as learning to listen well. The old axiom, “God gave us one mouth and two ears, so we should be listening twice as much as we speak” has more value than we probably realize. All of us like to be heard, yet being heard is predicated upon having something worth hearing. And you won’t have something worth hearing without first having heard.
Indeed, we learn to communicate first by hearing those around us speak. Without first being immersed in a dialect, we cannot communicate at all. There is simply no better way to learn a language than being dropped into a culture with no safety net and having to ask the simplest, most basic, questions for survival. When we are forced to listen, we begin to learn how to then communicate.
There is a major difference between listening and hearing, however. Hearing is passive. Many people have their television or radio playing during the day, without paying any attention to it. It’s simply background noise. Thoughts pass by without any awareness. Listening, on the other hand, requires focus, and the more intent the focus, the more deeply the person listening can understand.
When we give violin lessons in Midland, Texas we help the student being to acquire the skills of listening with attentiveness.
This all plays into the values stated earlier of consent, agreement, and community. If we cannot understand one another, then we cannot agree with one another. And if we cannot agree with one another, we cannot have community. So, the first step toward community is the choice to listen.
In our music lessons for violin in Midland, Texas we teach students that music is more than sound, it is relationships.
The two sides of a relationship are listening and communicating. When communicating, it should not only be our goal to be understood, but to make it impossible to be misunderstood. This requires intentionality.
Intentionality, however, should also be on the other side of the relationship: to make great effort to understand.
When either side of this equation begins to lack intentionality, a relationship begins to break down. All relationships require effort, and just like everything else around us, they are subject to entropy, or failure. Nothing good in life happens without it being intentionally set in motion. We may be the beneficiaries of good, but someone before us set that goodness in motion through active participation in its development.
We cannot, of course, control everything in life. Perhaps, the idea of control, is overemphasized in our Western culture. A better way of thinking about it is: participation in the development of that which is good. Gardening is a good metaphor. We plant seeds, we water them, we pull the weeds, we see that the plant gets enough sunlight. We can’t make it grow, but we can do our part.
Learning to ‘do our part’ in listening requires us to learn how to focus on that which is being said, filtering everything else out. The saying, “discerning the signal from the noise” is appropriate here. Many times, when I am attempting to converse with someone from another country who is speaking to me in broken English, I have to listen ‘between the lines’ for what is being said, parsing out the incorrect grammar and difficult pronunciation. When I understand what the person is saying, all of a sudden there is a point of relationship.
So, what does all of this have to do with music? Music is predicated upon listening. The great violin teacher at Juilliard, Dorothy Delay, pounded this concept into her students, making statements like, “Your ear has to hang on every note.” When asking Itzak Perlman what the most important thing he was thinking about during a performance, his reply echoed his teacher, “Listen, listen, listen!”
When we give cello lessons in Midland, Texas our students learn to do just that.
The activity of the listener is to listen. But it’s also the activity of the composer. If you apply that to the performer, what is the performer actually doing? What is the proper attitude for the performer when he is playing? The proper attitude is this; the performer must be listening to what he’s playing. And this is far from automatic. You can be playing and not pay attention to listening. It’s only when you’re engaged with the listening while you’re playing that the music takes on the creative unfolding, the moment of creativity, which is actually every moment. That moment becomes framed, as it were, in a performance. A performance becomes a formal framing of the activity of listening, and that would be true for the player as well. (Words Without Music, Phillip Glass)
So, listening to yourself is in a sense, having a positive relationship with yourself. This is not meant to be a strange statement. When we talk about our conscience, aren’t we really talking about our relationship with self? And this is predicated upon our inner imagination of what we have gleaned from other sources.
We provide students in our violin lessons in Midland, Texas with positive example of what to listen to by demonstrating for them in their lessons.
The good person brings out of his good treasure good things; and the evil person brings out of his evil treasure evil things. (Matt. 12:35)
Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old. (Matt. 13:52)
We bring forth out of our lives that which we have imbibed.
So take care how you listen; for whoever has, to him more will be given; and whoever does not have, even what he [a]thinks he has will be taken away from him. (Lk. 8:18)
When we learn to listen to others who have something worthwhile to share, we add treasure to our hearts from which to draw. And when we listen to ourselves, we are providing quality control to that which we are bringing forth, making sure that it accurately aligns with the imagination we have in our hearts.
In our viola lessons in Midland, Texas we help students make good choices of what music to listen to that will give them clarity of what good playing is, that which is worth emulating.
So, it’s a three-step process: 1) we listen to others, 2) we communicate, and 3) we listen to ourselves to make sure we have communicated well. Then the person listening to us does the same thing.
In our violin lessons in Midland, Texas many times our teachers will play a phrase and the student will play it back. In this way, the student is learning how to create a superior tone quality.
It is always our choice what to listen to, what to communicate and how to communicate. When we make these decisions well in life, we make good choices as to:
- Who to listen to
- Who to communicate with
- How to communicate
By studying music, all of these aptitudes are established and refined.