three texts from “listenings”

Jason Weiss
March 2023

Brainstreams

In her piece last week in the Science Times section, Natalie Angier reported how new research has at last identified specific neural pathways in the human brain that react to music. Or as she refers to that bend in the brain, the music room. Fascinated as I am to read these and other discoveries in the article, it seems to me I’ve been here before. The article itself was new to me, yet I felt as if I was already familiar with most of what was laid out there, not by scientific means but by my own experience as a listener. Other sounds count for nothing along the music circuits, say the researchers, and speech lights up a separate set of neural pathways. This all corresponds to my sense that we listen differently to music, words, sounds.

That music should prove as fundamental to the brain as speech, if not more so, also comes as no surprise. How could we imagine otherwise? And yet a puzzle remains, not addressed in the article: if it is so important, how can there be such a lack of sensitivity to music in so many people? Interest, curiosity, pleasure, even comfort—for some people, music stirs none of these. How is that possible? Holes in their education? Surely the condition goes deeper. Whatever accounts for that disposition, it doesn’t seem right. Music is like the invisible component in the bloodstream, indispensable at a cellular level.

The distinct realms of brain circuitry sparked by music and speech confirm my own instincts in practice. At my desk, I never turn on the radio and I seldom play vocal music; the demands of language perception, from outside sources, are kept at bay. In contrast to the general sense of music as abstract, the processing of verbal meaning works the mind in ways that tend to foreground the engagement with the sound stimulus (ie. words); so, language is comparatively concrete, despite the elusiveness of its meanings. Considering sound perception from another angle, I think of the varying effort it takes to disengage from the sounds around me when riding on the subway or in some other crowded public space. Speech, nearby conversation, is the hardest to render abstract, to not listen to. We’re suckers for anything reeking of meaning, not easy to let go of that bone. But when we are foreigners in that subway car, and the ambient conversations are in a language we don’t know or at least is not our native tongue, so much easier it is to blur the meanings away. Then our thoughts can fly elsewhere while we dwell in the crowd.

Writing Liner Notes

Any number of implications might spin out from the simple act of listening to music. Among the most ridiculous of those spinnings is the five-act comedy that unfolds whenever I set out to write liner notes. Not that I’ve written so many such notes—maybe a dozen times in three decades—but once I’m asked I want to say yes, and so I labor over intangibles for days, weeks on end. In that interval, most other writing—most other listening, too—gradually comes to a halt. But the brand-new record I’m writing about, or for, or on the occasion of, I listen to over and over again, and over and over some more. I listen to it every which way possible: across it, under it, in different orderings, softly, at full volume. I think, once this is done, I might not ever listen to it again.

For the longest time, though, that writing of notes is not done. How can it possibly go on for so long? I listen and listen, I scratch out some phrases, string them together, reach for the next point—and then much of it unravels. Where was I going with it? Pages of notes and phrases I’d scribbled; but find a beginning, construct a coherent text? I wish it were easier. Each day I manage to add a sentence or two, a slow accretion of reflections and statements, articulating its own sense of movement.

The music takes a while to sink in. Or rather, it takes many listenings to find a language to speak about the music. Can’t be helped. I want to know as much as I can regarding the occasion for the music that I’m hearing, though may use little of that information in what I end up writing. That’s the first obstacle in trying to speak of an invisible object: what to say about it. I have no interest in composing a breezy profile or tackling a track-by-track analysis; I want to say something unique to this record, so I have to find out what that is.

While I am in the midst of that writing, still listening or sometimes no music at all, it seems absolutely absurd how slow a text can be in its elaboration. This last time, I spent two weeks filling two pages. Certainly, I have considered that the slowness is all mine. And yet, trying to be coherent, to actually say something worthwhile and not waste people’s time, is a matter of great pains. I do not deny that it takes me a long time each day to settle down to the task. The avoidance principle remains in play, without a doubt. Rewards are necessary too, now and then, because you know it will get done eventually, very soon it will.

On the other hand, last year, at a difficult time, I wrote liner notes in a process that was quite unlike the usual pattern. A friend, who had given me most of his records in the six years since I knew him, asked me to write something for his new record. I had imagined he probably would ask me sooner or later, though I had no idea what I could possibly say. His music is an acquired taste, and not much like anything else. I was away, dealing with family issues, when he sent me the links to the music. Before long, he grew anxious about the schedule, sooner than he initially told me, and I had neither the focus nor the time to listen to those tracks, let alone whether the very old computer at my disposal (the only internet connection) could handle it. Then one morning I woke up before six, and lying there trying not to get up yet my mind running, I began to think of the opening lines. So, I did get up and for the next hour or two wrote out the requested liner notes—without having once heard the record. I had listened to a lot of his music and seen him play on multiple occasions, in this case all of that sufficed for what I needed. I could speak more broadly about his music, and maybe it was better that I didn’t have to get bogged down in all that new listening.

Prepositions

One of those words that bear an implicit assumption of a second word, usually a preposition. Listening to. What? That is the most immediate dynamic adhering to the single word: listening—to something.

Fine. We could be at it for years just on that, drawing it out. But we might also consider other prepositions, to start with. What do they do? What nuances do they awaken?

Listening at. The limits. The speed of. An altitude of. Listening after. Dark. Making love. Listening into. The deepest corners. Your heart. Listening behind. Your movements. Walls. Listening from. A quiet place. Fear. Up a tree. Listening past. The graves. The noise. Listening on. A whim. A mountainside. Your Aunt Betty’s rooftop. Listening through. The lousy melody. The stuttering. The water. Listening under. The house. Your breath.

Most often, there is still the sense of to lurking. But what about just listening, without any prepositions. Is listening lonely? Does listening not know what to do by itself? Listening is a form of attention. It happens both voluntarily and involuntarily. She was not trying to listen in on our conversation. Do we not listen, frequently enough, without our full attention? Our willful attention will likely be marshaled when we listen to something, but there is also a kind of listening that pulls in everything out there, open to the full spatial complexity of a given place and time. Listening indeterminately, yet in appreciation of what is found.

Are these modes of listening, these shifts of inner mechanisms and balances, mutually exclusive? Our listening can do it all, if we so choose. You can hear the lovely music along with the movements of the crowd and the wind through the trees. No need to be distracted. You are part of the concert.

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Jason Weiss is a writer, editor, and translator.  His book Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers (Iowa, 1991; Jabès, Cioran, Sarraute, Kundera, Ionesco, Cortázar, etc), was followed by four other books on literature and music, published mostly by university presses; that first book was published in a Farsi translation in Tehran in fall 2018. More recently,  he’s published Cloud Therapy (Talisman House, 2015), short nonfiction texts on swimming, and Silvina Ocampo (NYRB, 2015), his translation of selected poems by the Argentine writer. With Iris Cushing,  he co-edited a book of selected poems by the late California poet Mary Norbert Korte (1934-2022), Jumping into the American River, due out this spring.