Learning to listen, learning to look

On the difficulty of knowing what to do with our brains

Adam Kotsko (United States), Untitled Landscape, 2024

Last night, we went to the Jazz Showcase to hear the Melissa Aldana Quartet (who are playing two sets tonight as well, if you’re in town!). We were fortunate to have seats right by the stage, and we were impressed by the sheer physicality of the performance—the pianists’ tortured posture and odd grimace as he sought his way into the improvisation, the drummer’s casual stance as he invented more and more elaborate fills, and above all the saxophonist’s embouchure and even the visible tightening and loosening of her tendons. (No offense to the bass player, but he was hidden behind the other musicians from our perspective.) The music was sometimes overwhelming, a sheer wall of sound, but there were moments of transfixing quiet when it felt like they had the audience in the palm of their hand.

None of this, I assume, came across in the grainy phone videos dutifully captured by two older men at the table next to us. In the moments when I was distracted by their flashing screens, I felt a flash of irritation, but it quickly turned to pity. Why translate a live experience like this into a shitty YouTube clip? I was reminded of the museum patrons who treat their visit as an opportunity to document every artwork with their phone. Mind you, I am not talking about people who take photos of works they especially enjoyed or want to look up later, nor even those who seek out selfies with the “celebrities” of art history (though the latter can be annoying). I’m talking about those creepily determined patrons who systematically take a photo of every work, occasionally pushing aside their slower peers. I don’t doubt that they are intensely focused on the important work of photography, just as my fellow jazz listeners were presumably carefully attending to the act of recording. In either case, attention to the act of documentation substitutes for attention to the actual experience itself—they are literally stealing away their own first-person experience in real time, in exchange for digital files that neither they nor anyone else will ever look at.

I was more troubled by a refreshingly analogue distraction: an older couple (what is up with these Boomers and their misbehavior at jazz shows?!) right behind us was trying to hold a conversation nearly the whole time. The video distraction was an occasional blip, but the conversation really distrupted my experience. The issue was not just the sound itself, which was in principle easy to ignore and not the only non-musical sound (as the club has a working bar). My own irritation took me out of the moment, as I fantasized about how to get them to stop and rehearsed stern monologues at them for their rudeness.

In this case, I was ultimately the one stealing away my own first-person experience. Eventually I managed to make eye contact and make a shushing gesture, and thankfully I was able to ignore their continued conversation after that futile intervention. But I realized, in retrospect, that my own distraction was in a way a welcome respite. I am fairly musically educated, but less familiar with jazz than with classical. At times, during the extended solos, I will admit that I simply lost hold of the music, which came to feel like a disaggregated mass of “stuff” rather than the intricate performance it really was. In those moments, it felt easier and more comfortable to nurse my resentment at the couple’s rudeness than to try to find my way back into unfamiliar musical territory. This is where those quiet moments proved decisive, bringing everyone, including me and my talkative nemeses, back into focus.

With greater distance, I can even muster up some empathy for the rude couple, who were presumably a bit out of their depth. I’d imagine that they were expecting more accessible material, an old-timey experience, rather than the homage to Coltrane and Monk that they actually got. Few people really understand how to devote their full attention to music, much less purely instrumental music, and so they treated it as the background that music mostly is to us, most of the time. (I’d still like to think that they could have read the room, realized no one else was talking, and quietly endured the ninety-minute set like grown adults, but hey.)

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I remember my first professional orchestral concert. It was on a trip with my high school band, which annually went to a competition in a large city, mainly as an excuse to travel and have some cultural experiences. I went to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco over the years, and all of the trips were formative experiences. The concert I remember most was in New York. We had the worst possible seats—the very front row—and it was a program not exactly calculated to blow the hair back (the best of British composers, definitely the B-team of classical music). I was fascinated by the program, which seemed to have more information about music than I’d ever had access to. Not knowing what to do with my brain, I thought I would read the program along to the music, as though it would somehow “explain” each piece as it unfolded. This did not prove to be the case. I couldn’t focus on the music, but I also couldn’t focus on what I was reading, because I was worried I was missing the music—which I definitely was!

Many years later, I was assigned to teach the fine arts course in the Shimer Great Books program. This was a famously problematic course, which faculty members without musical training were reluctant to try to teach and the students mostly found baffling. I am always especially drawn to those kinds of challenges and was putting a lot of effort into learning about art (about which more below) and reconnecting with classical music so that I could be the one to finally crack the code. One of my older colleagues was a symphony subscriber and donor who offered me some tickets to an open rehearsal that he couldn’t use. Almost as an act of fate, the program started with British music—Walton’s first symphony—and continued with Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.

Somehow the context of the rehearsal (so familiar to me as a band geek) opened things up for me, even though it turned out that they did not “need” a ton of extra practice, and I found myself able to pay attention in a different way and even follow this music that I had never heard before. Soon I found a source of more free tickets, as a CSO musician I met through social media offered me many comp tickets, and I became a hardcore regular. For a few years, I probably saw around 80% of the programs that came through the CSO. While I admittedly do not have as much technical knowledge as I should—for instance, I can’t identify the stages of the sonata-allegro form on the fly—I did start to get an organic feel for the music of different composers and eras, and I developed a preference for the less popular “weird” music of the 20th century (for which there were fortunately always many comp tickets available).

I remember a few milestones, many of which turn out to be Beethoven-related—hearing Mitsuko Uchida perform a Beethoven concerto and being absolutely transfixed by her idiosyncratic performance, which brought such emotional depth out of the music; hearing another Beethoven concerto and feeling like it was more in the style of Mozart, only to research the topic later and find that the tribute was likely intentional; or hearing a performance of the Eroica symphony and realizing that I had enough background that I could intuitively feel why this would have been a big deal at the time.

But even after all these years, I still get distracted, I still lose the thread, and I still let myself focus too much on other concert-goers’ (mercifully rare) inconsiderate behavior. I still find myself hungry for some visual stimulation—this is what makes concertos especially appealing, for example, because you have a particular musician to focus on. Sometimes the visual element helps me understand something about the music that would wash over me in recording. I don’t think I really understood the conceit behind Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra before I visually saw that one particular section of the orchestra was the focus for each movement, nor did I realize how strange the instrumentation for Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was until I saw the oddly truncated orchestra, in which a cellist was forced to play the role of concert master because there simply were no violins. And I still get exhausted at times, even after I implemented my strict “no Bruckner” policy.

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Paying attention is hard! The people recording with their phones—which does occasionally happen at the CSO as well—have found one way not to pay attention, but I suspect that sometimes the listeners who try to “decode” the music via technical terms are finding another way not to pay attention. This comes up a lot in Shimer classes with musical materials, where there is often a strict divide between those with and without musical training. In the conext of a few weeks, the students without musical training are simply never going to catch up—even on something that, to me, seems very simple, like recognizing whether a passage is using a duple or triple rhythmic pattern. Nor do I think that the musically trained students are gaining much from using the piece as a pop quiz on what they can remember from band.

To generate some kind of coherent discussion, I try to get them to focus on the emotional content of the work. To many students, this seems to be inherently subjective and undiscussable, but I try to break this assumption as quickly as possible. Back at the old Shimer, when we had all the students more or less trapped in the set curriculum, I spent the first day going over the aria to Bach’s Goldberg Variations again and again. First I would ask them to try to think if there were any divisions or turning points in the music—after a couple listens, we would quickly come to a consensus on that. Then I would ask them to describe the emotional tone of each of our sections. Lo and behold, people would come up with very similar adjectives! So striking was this consensus that the students themselves would find their way to a deeper similarity in the few cases where the descriptions initially seemed very different. Then I would ask them to describe—in terms where they could reasonably expect that everyone at the table would know what part of the music they were talking about—what it was about the music that gave them that emotional impression.

Over time, we built up to a paper where they would offer a “thick description” of a classical piece, as well as a fully student-driven discussion where they would listen to a new piece and take notes (with me announcing new “sections” for their reference). The method wasn’t fully inductive. I gave them some basic concepts—consonance vs. dissonance (which is more or less an objective fact of how our ears are structured), tension and release, theme and variation, rhythm and tempo, the effects of timbre (without having to recognize the instruments involved), etc. These concepts gave them something to listen for. And what was striking was not just that everyone could engage at that level, whatever their level of previous musical experience, but also the fact that this was new to all of them, even the musically trained ones. The best the latter could do when listening was imagining what the sheet music must look like, or essentially imagining what it would be like to perform it. But that is different from listening. Even the band and orchestra geeks were never taught to listen.

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Something similar happens with art, I find. No one is taught to really look. Instead, in a weird inversion of the problem with music, looking is supplemented by listening. One can hardly visit a museum without being afflicted by the distinctive yammer of a tour guide, and many patrons avail themselves of recorded audioguides. I hate the tour guides’ lectures, which as a rule focus on historical background, biographical information, supposed symbolism—anything but the work itself. The same is often true of the descriptive material provided on the wall, which makes me shun the audioguides in the anticipation of more of the same. I do not go to the art museum to listen, but to look! But what to look for, that is the question.

Here, too, I have two origin stories, one from my earlier education and one from the Shimer fine arts class. The former was something that only occurred to me recently. In my first semester at Podunk Christian College, like everyone else, I took the required Intro to Fine Arts course, which was team taught by a music and art professor. The course was great, in large part because both professors were total dorks in the best possible way (for instance, the music professor was the kind of guy who would show up in a tuxedo with tails to “perform” John Cage’s 4’33”). What jumps out at me in this context was a visit to the Art Institute in Chicago, where the art professor gave us a guided tour of his favorites—above all Degas, whose name he insistently mispronounced as DOO-gah. I was deeply impressed by his enthusiasm and his stories about coming to the Art Institute as a working class kid. I don’t remember his name, and he certainly wouldn’t remember me, but he taught me, a working class kid with cultural ambitions, that it was possible to truly love art. (Degas does not really grab me at this late date, but I remember putting Degas images up as backgrounds on my computer freshman year.)

Fast forward a decade or so. Before officially teaching the fine arts class, I was actually required to take it as a student, which meant that I got a free Art Institute membership for a year (thanks to a generous donor to Shimer College). One of our key readings was Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne, which is of course beautifully written and super compelling given that it’s Rilke. Yet despite feeling very attracted to this text, I found that I really could not understand what he was saying. Armed with unlimited free admission, I decided to do an experiment. I would go to the Art Institute and camp out by the Cézanne paintings, studying them until I “got it.” I documented my experience at the time, which proved to be a real breakthrough. For better or worse, from that point forward Cézanne was my guy, and I sought out his works in every museum I went to, almost as a “collector.” (I imagine not many Cézanne fans have seen this piece from the Art Gallery of New South Wales!)

One thing that Cézanne primed me to focus on was the act of painting as such—the brushstrokes, the odd and unexpected mixture of colors, the increasing prevalence of visible canvas as his style developed. It felt as though the landscape or still life was a kind of scratch pad to generate a composition of paint. Once I was teaching the class on my own, the same older colleague who gave me the open rehearsal tickets suggested that I include Svetlana Alpers’ The Vexations of Art on the syllabus. I was fascinated by her approach to Velázquez, which suggested there was something about his very technique of painting that contributed to the meaning or effect of his works—above all in Mercury and Argus, which I have prominently displayed (along with a Cézanne Mt. Ste. Victoire) in my office at school:

The focus on brushstrokes was somewhat artificial for me, since I had not picked up a brush since junior high art class. (My Esteemed Partner and I ultimately did a painting retreat in Greece where I tried my hand at painting. My best effort is the title image for this post; further details, including my complete artistic works, are available here.) But it was productive for class discussion because it was something that was (a) objective and (b) not solely based on the content of the painting. For representational paintings, I did of course want them to talk about the content, but I wanted them to see that the way it was painted made a difference, to see the painted surface as more than a window on an imagined scene (and certainly not to assess works solely in terms of perceived “realism”), in short: to see form. I would ask questions such as where the eye is drawn first, whether there is a certain path through the image one feels drawn to follow, whether there is a predominance of certain colors in certain parts of the canvas—basically inducing them to pay attention to all the things you can see if you let your eyes blur and look at the painting as blobs of color.

Getting students to talk about art in this minimally informed way was much, much easier than teaching them to listen to music, because basically everyone in contemporary culture finds it easier to focus on images than on things that unfold over time. This strain of the course culminated in a visit to the Art Institute, where I would briefly take them through the Impressionist wing, directing their attention to some of the highlights, then instructing them to pair up, choose a painting, and spend time in extended dialogue about what they see. After leaving them to their own devices for fifteen minutes, I went around to each pair, and without exception, they had interesting and unexpected things to say, even about works I was very familiar with. (None chose Cézanne, however, perhaps because I had shared with them my breakthrough experience.)

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On the painting retreat, I was anxious to legitimize my presence. My Esteemed Partner has considerable experience painting and even has a mini-studio in the corner of our office, ready to go whenever she is moved to pick up the brush. For my part, I can barely draw. In conversation with my fellow painters, I pointed again and again to my teaching, presumably to the point of annoyance, and kept saying I was going to steal certain exercises for my class. In reality, though, my interest in art far exceeds anything that could possibly be necessary for the very, very basic introductory units on art that I am occasionally called upon to teach (and which I have not in fact taught since the painting retreat, which remains the sum total of my practical painting experience). As with classical music, my experience of learning to look turned me into a genuine art lover. My number one priority whenever we travel is to hit the art museums, and over the past fifteen years I have enjoyed a huge number of the greatest artworks in the Western tradition. This summer we had planned to visit Amsterdam, as our last big “museum city” in Europe, but opted not to, due to the global turmoil, etc.

In compensation, I have been reading about Dutch art, which turns out to be the primary specialty of Svetlana Alpers. I have also returned to T.J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life, which tries to make an argument about how Manet’s style of handling the paint somehow fits with the ideological dyamics he is struggling to capture. I enjoy Clark’s criticism for the same reason that I do Alpers’—even when they are talking about historical or biographical context, they always give the reader something to look at. And despite their towering erudition and intellectual ambition, the elements they point out are most often very accessible and tangible, with immediate payoff for the enjoyment of the work and the discovery of its ever-greater weirdness.

These kinds of visual touchstones, it seems to me, could very easily be provided in a museum context. In place of the yammering about historical generalities or gossip about the painter’s life or hackneyed symbolism, tour guides could simply point out a few key aspects of the painting’s form and invite their charges to reflect among themselves. I know this is possible because I have done it—both with students and, sometimes, with friends and colleagues who accompany me to the museum and seem to be a bit at a loss as to what they are supposed to be looking for. Often all it takes is one or two indications and they have a way in. Any painting worthy to hang in a museum is going to invite this kind of structured looking, is going to reveal greater depths and become stranger and more compelling.

We don’t need to know a lot of historical trivia or background—what there is to see is right there, right at the surface, just as what there is to hear in a musical work is right there, right in the flow of sound itself. We can learn to look, learn to listen, and honestly, we can do so fairly easily. But for whatever reason, we as a culture do not provide these simple tools, to students or to adult patrons of the arts. Instead, we treat art and music either as fodder for training practicioners or as historical trivia to be memorized. The yammering tour guides and gossipy program notes receive their deserved answer in the viewers and listeners who transmute their experience into archival documentation in real time. In neither case is our attention directed to what is right there.