Familiarity breeds respect first

This, in many ways, is the coming together of several posts, all about music. It may be that to dance with music (not to it, it must be with it... to be a part of it...) changes the way in which we listen to that music, since it instils the body in the listening process. In fact, as I sit here and enjoy a new CD--Mariza's Transparente, an impulse buy--I want to ponder again what Rogers suggested after my string quartet virginity was utterly taken, without question. After my musings on a set of Russian quartets, he posed the question: "I wonder ... whether we might also think about the Affekt here as also in some sense about broader processes - not just your education, your special knowledge ... but also a more embedded (but not universal of course) or visceral thing going on here too. Are there shared bodily experiences of music which might approach a trans-cultural dimensions of meaning or am I a hopeless romantic as well?"

I have also been giving serious thought to conversations I have had over the space of months now with IQ, and various bits of teaching that I have done, or am dreading doing... I knew more or less from the opening gestures of this CD what I was to expect. Quickfire musical analysis, of the kind that my students do but don't think of themselves as doing. I 'teach' them how to analyse; they complain of not being able to; I insist that they have the skills anyway... there's nothing to read, just their own efforts to make... more of what they do anyway... The chord patterns, the strumming, the interplay of bass pedal and chords, all screams fado to me, and as the voice enters that screaming becomes supersonic. I feel the chord progressions before they happen, and if they don't happen as I expect, I am delightfully perturbed. I try to explain this to my students, to explain tension and resolution, and I am bothered by some of the blank faces. This I imagine to be something that they can do, they can surely feel it... no?

I often wonder what it is like to have had no musical training, to have dedicated no time to developing aural skills, not to have played through scales and arpeggios over and over, not to be able to see keys of a piano in my mind as I hear music play, not to be able to feel the chords beneath my fingers on the neck of a guitar... Perhaps if I could remember that time, that lost moment of my life, I could teach them better. My familiarity--over-familiarity, perhaps--with the object that I hear, and see by extension in what is sometimes almost synaesthetic... my familiarity has left me incapable of empathy. But my familiarity is also what enables me not only to feel and see as I hear, but also precisely to understand that I am doing these things.

I don't know if I would change my response to Rogers' question. I hope, like him, in a hopelessly romantic sort of way, that such things can be approached. Without it, perhaps my teaching is for naught. But as I listen over and over to material with which I am as yet unfamiliar, I know exactly how much I am learning to understand the structures, patterns, and gestures, and--more to the point--how much of the pleasure I derive from music comes from that understanding.