3. Hearing

As you may have noticed, one major recurring theme throughout this book is the vital importance of listening: keeping your ears “turned on” when engaged in music-making. In Chapter 5: Active Listening we learned a powerful way to do this through Active Listening. In Chapter 14: Playing By Ear we introduced the Listen-Engage-Express process, and in Chapter 15: Improvisation the Play-Listen/Listen-Play loop. And earlier in this chapter we discussed how listening can transform our “all output” recital into a musical Conversation.

Nobody would doubt that a musical performance will be far better if the musician is alert to the sounds being made—and yet it’s all too easy for us to be so wrapped up in Head and Hands that our Hearing shuts off almost entirely!

In the previous section on Head we began to open up our awareness during a performance. Now let’s look in more detail at the specific ways we can engage our Hearing. We’ll use that term here to mean both literal listening with our ears, and the broader mindful awareness which can include everything we see, feel, and experience in the moment.

Intentionally cultivating our Hearing during performance not only enables Conversation, it enhances our Creativity and brings us a deeper Connection: between our Head, Hands and Heart, to the music itself, to our instrument, to other musicians and to our audience.

Hearing The Music

Music is broadcast into every corner of modern life. A musical soundtrack accompanies our shopping, our driving, our socialising, our internet surfing, our movies, our worship, our dancing, our sleeping, our waking, our exercise…

Personally, I wouldn’t have it any other way! But it does make it all too easy for music to be relegated to the background, training us to mostly tune it out and be aware only of the surface level (if that).

As music-makers, rather than just music consumers, we need to take music out of the background and into the foreground. We learn to do this through Active Listening, as covered in detail in Chapter 5: Active Listening.

You can make use of the same technique of “listening with a question in mind” in your Performance Practice and in your real performances, asking questions like:

• “What’s my musical role in this part of the song?”
• “What difference does it make if I add a slight crescendo here?”
• “Is my switch from strumming to palm-muted picking here sounding smooth enough?”
• “Which other member of the band do I most need to blend and synchronise with?”
• “What Expression techniques can I use to amplify the emotion in the bridge?

We can also make good use of Audiation to enable Performance Practice even when away from our instrument. Often deficiencies, limitations, and weak points in our real performances will show up even in our imagined performances, and can be practiced and improved surprisingly effectively there too, through Mental Play (see Chapter 3: Audiation for details).

Every aspect of our performance can be examined and experimented with through Active Listening and Audiation. Using Deliberate Practice (Plan, Play, Reflect) we can identify what to focus on and how.

Active Listening brings creative choices into the listening process, and through experimenting in Audiation, we can develop our Creativity with the performance itself. When we engage our Hearing we are able to participate in a lively Conversation with the music itself as we play, resulting in a deeper and broader Connection with the music we hear and the music we play.

Hearing the Form

One particularly valuable aspect to consider is the Form. With a strict “play through with no mistakes” mentality, it’s very easy for musicians to get lost during a performance. This often becomes one of the biggest causes of anxiety, whether playing with the visual cue of sheet music or without.

By increasing our awareness and understanding of the Form, and keeping our Hearing engaged, we can gain a firm sense of where we are in the music at any given moment—and if you do happen to lose your place momentarily, your grasp of the Form can provide the “signposts” to get you back on track fast.

We cover Form in Chapter 5: Active Listening and Chapter 16: Songwriting, including guidance on how to identify the top-level structure of the music (its sections such as verse, chorus, bridge, or A and B sections) and more fine-grained structure (such as individual phrases and the layers of Texture). If you’re playing from notation these may be marked—but don’t let that cheat you out of gaining the inner mental representation of the structure and the ear-based recognition of what happens when.

When we engage our Hearing during Performance Practice we can gain a very detailed and clear mental representation and aural image of “how the music goes” in our head, letting us connect more deeply and always know where we are during performance.

Hearing Other Musicians

We’ve already mentioned the added pressure that can be felt when other musicians are in your audience, and that goes double when you’re actually playing together with them!

When we play in a group, we tend to focus so intently on staying in our lane and playing our part correctly that it’s easy to let our ears “turn off”. As long as everyone starts at the same time and plays their part correctly, it should all work out, right?

In fact, this is another clear example of where stellar performances go far beyond just “getting the notes right”. When we’re in the audience for an amazing performance by a band, we love the way the musicians interact on stage. Whether they dance and sway in their chairs like a string quartet, sing harmony while staring into each other’s eyes, or leap and headbang in unison, we can see that there’s nothing like the joy of making music together, and there’s something special going on.

We can see and hear the Conversation that’s occurring, we can witness the raw Creativity, we can feel the deep Connection.

So how do we go from “carefully staying in our lane, with ears off” to that kind of free, connected, alive musical performance?

Again, the solution isn’t to develop our Hands to be so incredible that we finally, hopefully, one day feel that freedom. The solution is to make full use of our Hearing.

Active Listening can be your gateway here too, and if you’ve been practicing finding Creativity, Connection and Conversation between yourself and the music, finding it with other musicians will feel like a natural next step.

This doesn’t need to be a “one day, maybe”. The sooner in our musical journey that we begin to “reach out” to other musicians with our ears, the more enjoyment and Connection we feel, and the deeper we will understand the musical context in which we’re playing. In turn, our experience listening to the other musicians will accelerate our mastery of our own parts in the music.

What exactly does it mean to “Hear Other Musicians”? Let’s have a look at just a few ways we can start to truly hear our fellow musicians as we perform together:

• Musical Form: As well as helping us keep our place in the music, musical Form is also the glue that holds a group of musicians together. Pay attention to the structures and sections of the music. What changes and what stays the same when moving from one section to another? What is your musical role in defining the Form? What are the other musicians doing in these transitions?
• Cues: We can rely on musical cues at strategic moments to help us keep our place in the music and coordinate with the other musicians. For example, ensemble players with long periods of silence can easily lose their place while counting many measures of rest. But if we know the music, we’ll remember how it goes and be able to cue ourselves from the other musicians to know where to come in. We can then sit back and enjoy the music and come in at just the right time (which also happens to be much more fun than counting measures!)
• Groove: How does your part fit in rhythmically with the other musicians’ rhythms? From classical to funk, there is a special feeling when the parts “lock” together. Listen for and cultivate that feeling when playing with others.
• Musical Roles: Depending on the musical genre, certain instruments tend to take on certain roles. Western music commonly divides into melody, chords/rhythm, and bass, though many other layers can be added. Appreciating the role of each musician goes a long way to blending and balancing well with them.
• Foreground/Background: Relating to musical roles, also listen specifically for which instruments or voices belong in the foreground, and which in the background. When everyone is listening carefully to each other, we can make sure the audience are most aware of the right parts at the right times.
• Dynamics: Acoustics and amplification in live performance are a whole topic in themselves, but no matter the performance context, musicians still have to listen carefully to one another to know how loudly to play at any given moment. It will take practice to be able to judge how loud your instrument sounds to you when it’s at the right level in the overall blend of instruments, but the most important thing is to stay mindful of it and respond (Conversation) as needed, moment to moment.

Playing with other musicians can rapidly develop our Creativity as we become more fully engaged in the musical Conversations within the group and forge deeper Connection with them, as well as with the music itself.

Hearing The Audience

If we’re hearing the music, and hearing the other musicians around us, engaged in a creative, connected conversation… then it’s up to the audience to be hearing that, right?

As we touched on in the Head section earlier, some musicians do believe this, even making use of intentional techniques to block out and ignore the audience as much as possible.

But you’ve probably experienced the result yourself, as an audience member. Can you think of a concert you went to where a performer came on stage without even glancing at the audience, performed their music, and then walked off? It happens regularly at children’s music recitals, but I’ve also seen world-class professional musicians do the same thing. The aural experience of hearing the musical performance might be good—but it leaves you feeling a little cold. Again, music is a social artform, and when a performer behaves like that, we naturally feel a bit neglected and excluded.

Contrast that with any concert, gig or performance you can remember where the musician truly connected with the audience. Maybe they were looking out and smiling before and after playing, maybe they took a bow, maybe there was banter between songs, maybe they even encouraged you in the audience to clap, sing, or dance along. Think about how much more vibrant and memorable that made the entire experience for you.

And now, with those two extreme examples in mind… Would you prefer to attend an audience-oblivious performance with not a single wrong note—or a vibrant, audience-inclusive performance where there was a musical flub or two?

Naturally, there are conventions and expectations that differ across genres and performance contexts. A string quartet at a funeral probably shouldn’t be inviting the audience to dance and clap along. But hopefully the point is clear: the audience is there to enjoy a meaningful musical experience, and that is so much harder for a musician to accomplish if they’re pretending the audience aren’t there at all.

Again, this shouldn’t be seen as a “one day, maybe” which you might feel ready for after years of honing your craft. Personally, I’d rather see and hear an engaging and enthusiastic rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” than a dry, rigid, robotic Beethoven Sonata! With that being said, the more comfortable and confident you are with the playing itself, the more attention and awareness is freed up to engage with the audience.

There are specific things you can practice, to help engage with the audience, such as:

• Planning your stage routine: how will you enter, exit, move between pieces.
• Preparing and practicing any on-stage speaking or banter you’ll include (you might be surprised to know just how much of what seems ad hoc and improvised to you as an audience member has actually been thoughtfully planned, and even scripted!)
• Considering if and when it would make sense to involve audience participation.
• Choosing the thoughts you project onto the audience, remembering they are there to enjoy and support, not to criticise and judge. You’ll almost inevitably project some assumptions about the audience’s experience, whether you mean to or not—so why not choose to make them positive and uplifting?
• Being thoughtful about how you hold yourself and move onstage, as well as your facial expressions. Remember we humans are highly visually-oriented creatures, including those in your audience! They may have come to listen, but they’ll be watching in every moment too.
• Focusing on one audience member at a time, making eye contact where appropriate.
• Feeling that “frizzle” of energy from the audience, and interpreting it in a positive way.

Any subset or combination of these will greatly help your audience feel included and involved, but remember that our goal is to turn the performance into a Conversation. Adding more forms of “output” is only going to be effective if you are “Hearing” the audience too.

Making eye contact, feeling the frizzle, facial expressions, anything you’ve planned to do on stage—all of these can be planned for and practiced, but must ultimately be handled with Creativity in the moment, adapting to the audience, if it’s to feel like a true Connection and Conversation.