Guest post by Michael Johnson

It’s funny how some random experiences can teach us important lessons in life. On an Air France flight across the Atlantic recently, I clapped on a new set of Bose wireless headphones and within minutes a stewardess was squeezing my shoulder. I looked up and saw her mouth flapping – but she made no sound. All I could hear was Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 that I was playing through my headphones. It took me a few seconds to regain my composure.  No, I didn’t need any more café, I told her. Back to the music, I was  experiencing the true meaning of “active listening”.

The sharp trebles and thunderous basses of quality headphones create a private world of pure music. Was I listening? Of course. One can hardly avoid listening to the Arkady Volodos performance of this brilliant concerto.

Best of all, on headphones nobody yells at me, ”Turn it down, for God’s sake!”

And yet ironically, the advent of listening through high-tech recording systems has in some ways been harmful, not helpful, to the modern world of serious music. We have removed much of  music from the intimacy of live salon style performances and created the sterile experience of playing a CD or downloading tracks from the Internet. Just 60 or 70 years ago it was only the live performance that brought audiences to the music and the player. Everybody got involved, everybody listened. Now that is largely gone, as concert venues sell us the super-stars such as Volodos, Yevgeny Kissin, Yuja Wang,  and possibly Khatia Buniatishvili. The second tier players attract mainly aging retirees, some of them asleep by the end of the first movement.

“We seem to have mastered the art of hearing without listening.” Christy Thomas, Yale Center for Teaching and Learning. “Active learning is a frequent topic of discussion in pedagogical circles today, but the notion of active listening is rarely addressed—if at all.^”

But now, waking up and learning to listen may turn out to be the saving grace of the classical tradition. The salon style in various forms can help, and it seems to be in vogue again. Both solo and ensemble players are happy to play in private homes with only 50 or so seats.

Natasha Cherny, New York-based artist manager and producer, tells me her salons in past years “were infinitely more satisfying from every perspective”. Her recital-goers were encouraged to mingle before and after the program “always including protracted conversations with the artist”. And former Juilliard professor David Dubal, pianist, pedagogue and accomplished painter, has been running his series of ‘Piano Evenings’ in New York for 30 years. His aim is to bring “the glories of the piano repertoire, in an intimate setting, dedicated to the art of listening”. He calls it “a site for collective learning through the exchange between teacher and student, performer and listener”.

Indeed, recorded music, no matter how perfect, misses the point. “We kind of caused the problem,” admits Andrew Scheps, an American recording engineer, by making it too easy to hear the notes while missing the intimate experience that players, especially solo pianists, want and need.

Pianists in this overcrowded field find that much of their recorded music ends up in background. An Italian pianist friend tells me the world of recordings has never been such a waste. “There are too many CDs. We can never get noticed.” Too often, a fine piano talent merely exists for his or her  background noise. In Bordeaux, for example, the main underground car park offers Chopin Nocturnes murmuring along with  honking horns and shouts from angry French drivers, hardly a perfect venue. The artist remains mercifully anonymous. Worse, nobody is listening to Chopin.

A comprehensive treatment of regaining that connection is explored in the book Music: The Art of Listening by Jean Ferris, a former music history and appreciation professor at Arizona State University.  “Listening to classical music is itself an art,” she writes,  “and good listening is an active, creative experience.”

The personal experience is further investigated in a recent documentary of a similar name, “The Art of Listening”, available free on YouTube:

There are perhaps two kinds of pianist, those that just hammer the clavier louder and faster and those like Volodos who listen intently to themselves as they brush the keyboard with their fingertips. In this recording, Volodos playing Rachmaninoff was all ears, and so was I:

Working as a critic, I am pleased to find more and more  attention to listening skills, a mini-movement on an international scale. Indeed, learning to listen is perhaps the best hope for rescuing classical music from the dustbin of history. Statistics are at an all-time low, ranking rock and hip-hop, rap, electronic dance music (EDM), country and jazz comfortably ahead. Classical occupies only about 4 percent of this world.  Could it be true that there is nowhere to go but up?

Many others in the realm of classical music have joined the movement. Julian Blackmore, a British composer and sound designer, takes a professional interest in absorbing and processing music in the brain. He calls it “active listening” and says it leads to a far deeper understanding and appreciation of complex compositions.

Being prepared makes all the difference. “As woo-woo as this sounds, it’s a unique and priceless kind of satisfaction that money can’t buy,” he adds.

The online ‘Piano Encyclopedia’ promises that as you immerse yourself, “an ordinary auditory experience becomes  a profound connection – a kind of bond. Each note played has purpose and intention. By being fully engaging with the music, it speaks to your very soul.”

Learning to listen can provide this profound satisfaction, for example, in impressionist music. Creating color rather than line might seem elusive but through “active listening” this rich artistry can be appreciated.

Help is increasingly available. A wide choice of advice, courses and instructional videos from experts flood the internet  today. My favorite for beginners is a talk about how to take in what you are hearing: “How to Listen to Classical Music: Sonata Form”, accessible through this link:

And French musicologist Jean-Jacques Griot has marketed his “Ecoute Classique” (Listen to Classical) Zoom sessions effectively to internet users throughout the francophone world. He tells me he now has some 3,500 paying customers eager to follow his lessons for learning.  He does not try to make it easy. “”It takes time because learning classical music is a progressive process of assimilation,” he writes in his book Ecoute la musique classique – it can be learned”.

The late philosopher Rudolf Steiner wrote that music is the only art form that flows from the spiritual world, not from the material world as in architecture, painting, ballet, sculpture. If you step back and listen a great player such as Volodos, Yevgeny Kissin or the late Glenn Gould, you might agree with Steiner that music plays to your inner sense of well-being, as he wrote in his essays, compiled and published as The Inner Nature of Music: The Experience of Tone.

To take listening to classical music seriously is to find solace, reduce stress in your life and even improve your memory. Personally and for all these reasons, my life is filled with classical music, live and recorded. The sad opposite is also true: the latest fad fades away in seconds. When you listen to Rachmaninoff in the hands of Volodos you carry it in your head forever.

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Michael Johnson is a music critic and writer with a particular interest in piano. He has worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He has been a regular contributor to International Piano magazine, and is the author of five books. Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux, France. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian. He is co-editor with Frances Wilson of Lifting the Lid: Interviews with Concert Pianists.