Preface
A BRIEF NOTE ABOUT LISTENERS
It might be interesting for you to know that the techniques and concepts presented here have been tested with classically trained musicians, with listeners, as well as with, what can only be called, "hostile listeners"--the group of listeners who profess a strong antagonism to classical music. During our presentations, when the techniques were applied in the performance of the music, the result among classically trained musicians was mixed; about 95% loved the way the music sounded, and 5% of the musicians hated what they were hearing because it violated how they were trained to perform music and were openly antagonistic to the techniques. For listeners who were not musically trained, 100% felt inspired by the result, and for the hostile listeners, 100% were pleasantly surprised by what they heard. During the performances, it seems, hostile listeners discovered that the problem they had with classical music was the way it was played, not the music itself, nor their relative ignorance of that kind of music.
What impressed us most is that those so called hostile listeners are in fact incredibly smart and perceptive. They have zero patience for listening to music played in a manner that doesn't communicate. Moreover, they can tell within a few seconds of hearing a piece of music if they will hate what they are hearing or not. Furthermore, these disinterested hostile listeners were asked to tell the performers what to do to music to make that it work for them. Believe it or not, every suggestion they made was almost word for word what we have presented in this essay. When the performers played the music according to these suggestions, these hostile listeners responded with cheers for the players and the music, some saying that the performance brought them to tears.
Experiences/experiments like this ought to be conducted by everyone who is truly serious about learning the craft of musical communication. It is the only way to really know that these techniques and concepts work just as we claim. It is not enough to take these techniques on faith. They must be tested with listeners of all kinds. However, a word of warning, care must be taken in dealing with classically trained musicians because they tend to be too indoctrinated in the current style of playing classical music to respond in an unbiased manner. The current style is a way of playing in which these techniques are almost nowhere to be found. That way is what hostile listeners hate.
Interestingly, that hostility seems to be a response to the dismissive attitude among many classically trained musicians regarding audiences whom they blame as being unsophisticated and ignorant, and therefore not worth bothering with as listeners. And these listeners tend to write off classical musicians as being out of touch, indifferent, snobbish, solipsistic, and effete and therefore not worth listening to.
At the heart of this unfortunate controversy is the almost universal imposition of strict performance standards that classical music training has imposed on musicians. These standards force musicians to play music in an extremely mechanical manner, one characterized principally by absolutely strict metronomic regularity. This style was introduced during the 1940s and has been universally adopted by a majority of classical musicians over the last 80 years. That style became the dominant acceptable performance standard imposed on musicians worldwide; a style that sounds wooden, unmusical, highly mannered, mechanical, and cold. Listeners feel these affects of coldness, indifference to suffering, machine-like behavior, scolding, anger and the like and have chosen to spend their listening attention on music that doesn’t make them feel these feelings. Who can blame them? Even Arnold Schönberg complained about this mechanistic, anti-aesthetic behavior in an article he wrote, titled: "Today's Manner of Playing Classical Music", back in 1948 because he was so disturbed by this "sterilizing" trend of liquidating all expression from music.
Clearly there needs to be a way back to making performances of music that listeners love to hear. The question we have to ask is:
WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE AIM IN PERFORMING MUSIC?
We believe there is an ultimate aim in the performance of music because of the fascination human beings and even some animals exhibit for listening to music. That ultimate aim is to inspire the souls of listeners and to move their hearts to achieve catharsis. We recognize that there may be other aims, many of which are valid but which also don’t require such a specific explanation as does catharsis.
The crucial element of the cathartic experience for the listener is, we believe, what is known today as mirroring. That is, the unconscious and extremely subtle movements in the bodies of listeners that occurs in response to the movement in the music that is heard. These interior experiences in response to music evoke feelings of compassion, empathy, love, and inspiration.
Listen to the singing in this performance of “Its April Again” from the 1952 movie “Moulin Rouge” starring Jose Ferrer and ZaZa Gabor. Try to figure out 1.) if you experience extremely subtle physical inner responses to the music, and 2.) what the singer is doing vocally to create that mirroring response to her gestures and expressions.