|
|
On The Margins:
The Art Of Listening
Tom Davis
Things have been humming around the Davis household, what with new amps (Audio Matiére Equilibré, ARC D130) and new speakers (Vision Acoustics Bach, Wilson Benesch Act One) prompting the UPS man to mutter about weight limits for second-floor deliveries, and prompting me to reconsider the reasons Clark Johnsen gave a few issues back for begging off reviewing. Clark’s "what you need to do to do it right" list makes me hesitate about the fanatical little things I most certainly do not do. So even though my wife, Julia, thinks me obsessive, I can well imagine Clark just raising his eyebrows. But however much I get a charge from a beautifully designed piece of new gear, like the Equilibré or the Act Ones, at heart I’m just not a techie. As soon as I finish Kontaking the new connections, I shake off the system and shift my attention to the art of listening.
Beyond fetishist magic and sheer entertainment, the High End holds out the promise that listening itself can take on the work of art. For closing your eyes to listen alone in the dark can be the invitation to an active, not passive, responsibility. But just how creatively active can listening become? Take a simple example.
In my review of the Audient TACTIC/AUDIT in Fi #3, I brought up an interesting moment in a phone interview with Dar Williams just prior to the release of Mortal City. Near the end of that lengthy exchange I asked Dar about a cover she did of Richard Shindell’s "Nora." I wanted to know what prompted the changes she’d made in the lyrics. There was a slight pause, then she wanted to know what changes. I turned to my notes and began reading off three lyric changes accompanied by her "Oh . . . really?! I did that. . .?" Then, in response to the last change, she made a remark that caught me off guard. In Shindell’s original, a man remembering a past affair marks its poignancy by guessing his former lover might press a rose between the pages of her play he’s just received, meaning he finds himself wanting her gift to bear concrete witness to their past love. But in Dar’s cover the play actually did include a rose pressed between its pages. When I noted the change from "press" to "pressed," Dar immediately realized the whole tenor of Shindell’s original had shifted: in her cover it was the woman, not the man, taking romantically nostalgic initiative. I had been struck by the different feels between "original" and "cover," but it took Dar’s immediate take on what she had hitherto not heard to allow me, in turn, to understand my own intuition. The quickness with which she saw the implications of her "unconscious" lyric change showed me how, while I had heard a difference, I hadn’t taken up the invitation that difference presented to work out what it could mean.
Now Dar Williams is a gifted singer-songwriter who takes great care with her work both live and recorded (as Classic Records discovered when they made unauthorized changes in mastering The Honesty Room for analogue release). Then how could this careful listener not have heard such a significant change either live or in recording?
But of course she had heard it, only just as a natural part of her song. She had heard through Shindell’s "original" to the next song imaginatively latent within it. So what was she being true to in making her cover? Dar half-joked with me that she would have to call Richard to apologize for the changes. But who honestly thinks the point of a cover is high fidelity? If a song is worth covering, then its claim promises more than its creator can realize. Shindell has said that he was "honored" to have Dar cover "Nora," what then did he hear? Not a transparent replication of his original effort, but the work of a recreative listening that transformed the initial potential of "Nora" into new meaning, a "reproduction" in the sense of meaning born anew. "Nora" succeeded as a song by prompting its own successor, this next "Nora," that in its own riches might promise yet more creative success by another artist. Which is the way the work of art works itself out.
What if we take the notion of covering a song as a clue to understanding what "reproduction" can mean in the High End? Being true to the richness of an "original" is then not a matter of transparency to source, as if the point is to hold a sonic mirror up to a moment frozen in time. The re-creative point is to hear through to further possibilities. One horizon of musical possibility opens in live performance; another horizon opens in my living room. Listening at home I heard a difference that Dar had listened past, and she, surprised, immediately interpreted that difference in a way that re-opened "Nora" for both of us. The more resolute the system, the more obvious the differences, the more compelling the invitation to interpret what such differences mean in the ongoing life of the claim of music.
When I refer to the "claim" of music, I’m pointing to the way music takes on a life of its own. When something (or someone) claims you, you find yourself invited to respond in a way that can open an exchange. The tacit promise of such an exchange is that it will take on a life of its own; the tacit question is whether you’re ready to let it unfold where it will. Such "readiness" and "letting" involve the grace of an imagination seeking to realize the potential hidden in the original claim. The promise of new musical life in my living room unfolds through an art of listening attuned to the unique range of possibilities that creative reproduction can open. Or is such talk just another "subjectivist" self-indulgence that doesn’t do anything when it comes to engineering those shining new components manufacturers send me to "review" the differences they make?
My hunch is that the best designers encourage open conflict between compellingly different sensibilities of listening — how else do you learn to listen beyond your own encrusted assumptions? But I’ll save discussing such a hunch with one or two designers for another column. Here let me introduce a different angle on what I mean by the art of listening by highlighting the very different sensibility at work in ABX testing.
Consider how the power of imagination is conceived in ABX testing. We’ve all heard things not there, heard what we wanted (or feared, or needed) to hear. And we all have some practice in disabusing ourselves of such self-deception. Which means we all know what it means for desire to abuse imagination, to turn it into a means for satisfying its own demands. But imagination in the service of desire is precisely not the sense of imagination at work in art. For art is not about your desires; and the more imagination is bound to you, the less it can make way for that other life that is the claim of music. ABX testing disciplines desire. But that process is different — in kind, not just in degree — from the art of listening. Something that can be further seen in a rather playful way by considering John Cage’s most infamous musical experiment.
The key to ABX testing is, of course, that the "X" is random. If you want to confirm a repeatable sonic difference between transports "A" and "B," then after familiarizing yourself with both, and with both hidden from view, you randomly switch to "X" and identify it as either "A" or "B." If you can’t correctly identify A as "A" better than you could by chance, then you haven’t been able to discriminate a real — instead of just a desired — sonic difference. And however you might criticize such a set-up — for example, that there’s a "performance demand" built into such a test that is intrinsically alien to following the claim of music — it certainly can show you how powerful some kinds of expectation are. But then, so does Cage’s experiment with silence, and indeed through casting a new light on the concepts of "random" and "chance" essential to ABX testing.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Cage’s non-piece of "music," the one where the pianist comes in, sits down, and does nothing for the length of the "piece." If you haven’t heard it live, perhaps you can imagine yourself doing so. Or perhaps not. I mean: what are you supposed to do? The pianist is just sitting there casually composed, poised, with nothing to do. And you? What are you supposed to do with that "nothing"?
The difficulty Cage has created for you as a listener is the difficulty of just listening. For his invitation in extending a period of "silence" is that you might realize the peculiar possibilities that listening to nothing in particular brings, of which the first is listening to the way listening itself takes place. And with that turn, suddenly a new world of involvement with the "randomness" of this or that chance sound can open up and thereby invite you to recreate how meaning is born.
What interests me in thinking through this Cagean invitation is the way the concepts of "randomness" and "chance" have been transformed from the scene of the ABX test. Both situations are inviting you to discriminate sound as sound, and that such sound be random, a matter of chance, is necessary to both. Moreover both are interested in discriminating the power of imagination, and both involve you in peculiar anxieties about "performance." But what Cage, smilingly, is inviting you to do in just listening is release the free play of imagination. He is creating the context for a possible change in a habit of mind that is necessary for music to be a work of art. He’s experimenting with the preconditions for such work, as if to say that in order for music to be music today, we need to re-familiarize ourselves with the strangeness of its necessary conditions, as if the very conditions for the creative work of listening, in a world awash in the constant electronic reproduction of sound, were themselves lost to us. Well, are they?
To act as if an ABX test could tell you anything about the work of listening involved in following the claim of music is a sign of how confused audiophiles can become about the creative art of listening that, if anything, is the pathos that redeems the intrinsic pathologies of this "hobby." Which is not to say that ABX testing doesn’t have its place. I’ve tried to make clear that it does in the disciplining of desire-enslaved imagination. And which is also not to say that I am in any way opposed to the work of psychoacoustics in improving the design of different parts of the "reproductive chain." But conceptual confusions about the relevance and irrelevance of ABX testing for the kind of listening that the High End promises as an art is rooted in deeper, more pervasive confusion summed up in the objectivist/subjectivist dichotomy that plagues how the High End understands itself.
Let me conclude this column by pointing to some aspects of this confusion that I’ll flesh out in the future.
Go back to my conversation with Dar Williams. It is a fact that Dar substituted "pressed" for "press" in the lyrics of "Nora." You might think Dar needs to invest in an audiophile system well able to discriminate between "pressed" and "press." But that’s silly, anyone can hear the difference on a boom box. Or rather anyone without any strong preconceptions about what the song means. The power of a cover is in its reconception of a song’s claim. The insight I took from thinking about Dar’s factual "mistake" is involved in its creativity. "Covering" a song recreates it in such a way as to open the way to another song that extends the possibilities inherent in the "original." "High fidelity" here is reproduction as rebirth, and recreative interpretation is intrinsic to the work of art itself, so that a genuinely active form of listening is intrinsic to how music takes on and maintains a life of its own. Such a life is intrinsically dialogic. So precisely to the extent that Dar suddenly re-heard her cover in its difference from the original, both it and the original took on new significance, took on meanings that aren’t "subjective" in any reductively personal sense, but have to do with the way music can expand its possibilities, its life, and thereby expand your own by way of this other life that proves so encouraging of new possibilities of meaning.
We’re capable of many kinds of dialogue, yet listening alone in the dark with your eyes closed to this collectively "objective" machine seems an especially unlikely setting for any sense of dialogue. But I for one don’t listen to1 my system, however much the role of "reviewer" promotes such a pathology. I simply follow where the claim of music takes me. Next time out I’ll take up a more extended example of the kind of dialogue intrinsic to following that claim by considering how my understanding of Janis Ian’s Revenge and Patty Larkin’s Strangers World have changed by way of recent changes in my system.
1 "They will ever believe a lie, who see with, not through, the eye." William Blake said it, as your Editor recalls; it seemed appropriate to cite the verse hereabouts. . . .