How to listen

"H e who has ears to hear, let him hear." — Matthew 11:15

When Rickey Minor was a young man, he was given a copy of the Charles Mingus album "Mingus Mingus Mingus."

He listened to it once, and hated it. The album was immediately exiled to the top of his refrigerator, where it gathered dust.

But one day, Mr. Minor attended a lecture at UCLA by Nat Adderly, Cannonball Adderly's brother and frequent collaborator. Nat Adderly played the audience a cut from a Charlie Parker album. But they didn't like it.

He then told them a story of how his brother invited him to hear Charlie Parker play in a club. He hated it. Afterwards, he told his brother, "That was nothing but noise. That ain't music."

Cannonball Adderly told him he was ignorant, that he didn't like the music because he didn't understand it. It didn't have to be his favorite music, he said, but he should at least attempt to understand it.

As Mr. Minor writes in his book "There's No Traffic on the Extra Mile," "Nat Adderly went on to tell us that once we truly understood the music we had just heard, our appreciation would go up. He reiterated what his brother had said, that everything we listen to will not be our favorite piece, but we should learn to recognize and appreciate what goes into it: the artistry, the talent, the craft, and all the various nuances."

"A person who's a layperson, I don't know how they listen to music ...The way I listen to music is part of the vocabulary I learned as a little baby. A layperson doesn't have a musical education. " —Jorge Mester, musical director of the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra After the lecture, Mr. Minor went home, took the Mingus album off of the top of the refrigerator, and gave it another listen. This time, he listened to it with new ears.

"To this day, I can sing all of the parts of the orchestra, the drums, the bass and the horns. Suddenly, I discovered what a phenomenal arranger Mingus was. I listened to it differently this time for one main reason. I had made a major attitude shift," he writes.

"The Charlie Mingus album was a challenge to me to move out of my complacency, a brisk slap in the face. It was as if a doorway had magically opened once I was willing to take that album on and learn to appreciate it. The next level was waiting. It taught me as well that at the moment you're about to have a breakthrough, there is usually an accompanying discomfort (and, most definitely, some hard work.")

BRUBECK Mr. Minor went on to have a career in which he's worked with artists such as Stevie Wonder, Sting, Ray Charles, Herbie Hancock, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys, The Dixie Chicks and Beyonce. He's worked on the Grammys and the Super Bowl and is now the Emmy-nominated music director of "American Idol."

Soon after I read Mr. Minor's book, a close friend told me that her father, who had grown deaf over the years, was going to undergo surgery for a cochlear implant.

What I found intriguing was that after the operation, he had to go for auditory therapy sessions to learn how to listen again, how to interpret the sounds he was once again able to hear.

And I thought about audiences here in Southwest Florida, how they seem so adamantly wed to the tried and true, how classical music lovers only want to hear their favorite composers, how opera lovers want to attend the same handful of operas over and over again. How people after a Wynton Marsalis concert here complained that he wasn't playing jazz! (I think they wanted to hear Benny Goodman-style music.) I guess they didn't know that Mr. Marsalis is the artistic director of jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City and received a Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 1997 oratorio, "Blood on the Fields," the first jazz composer to receive such an honor.

WADA I decided to talk to a handful of people who work with sound, to ask them how to listen. I talked to two classical music conductors, a jazz musician and an auditory therapist/researcher. Here's what they had to say.

THE MAESTROJorgeMester

Musical director of the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra

It's easier to learn a foreign language when you're a child, says Naples Philharmonic Orchestra music director and conductor Jorge Mester.

Adults have to work harder.

"I guess it's the same with listening," the maestro says. As a child, he grew up in a house filled with music. "I don't understand how people do listen to music. Ever since I was a baby, I listened to music, and as I have some kind of talent for it, I listen to it, and I practiced the violin.

"A person who's a layperson, I don't know how they listen to music. I don't know what it is that goes through their mind. The way I listen to music is part of the vocabulary I learned as a little baby. A layperson doesn't have a musical education. I'm not sure what it is they do with their brain when they listen to music."

In addition to his responsibilities with the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra, the maestro also conducts the Pasadena Symphony (this is his 25th year with them) and is currently the musical director of the Louisville Orchestra, after having had the job from 1967 through 1979.

"I'm breaking down prejudices, is what I think I'm doing," he says. "The first is: 'I don't understand music.' That's a prejudice. I don't think there's anything you should understand about it, though I don't deny an intellectual understanding of the process is helpful."

For example, he says, you gain a deeper feeling for a painting if you take a guided tour in a museum.

"It helps in the sense of, 'Oh, I did not realize that these are converging lines, and before a certain age, they didn't use converging lines.'"

That's similar to what he does with his pre-concert talks.

For example, he might explain that the third movement of Shostakovich's 8th Symphony consists of only quarter notes.

"Everyone plays four quarter notes per bar. It's a composer thinking outside of the envelope for a piece. People enjoy it, they understand there is something very unusual about this.

"At the same time, how do you explain to somebody who doesn't get it the incredible power of a late painting by Van Gogh? If they don't get it, what can you tell them about it that will all of a sudden create a cataclysm in their soul, and they burst out in tears at the paintings?

"Can you approach the soul through the brain?

"I don't have an answer. I just have a bunch of questions."

Audiences in Europe are much more educated about music, he says.

"We don't have that educated audience in the United States. When you go to a concert in Germany, they listen, because they've had an education. That's why people in the United States need a pre-concert lecture. I don't think they have them in Europe. Maybe if someone's written a brand new piece, the composer comes out and talks about it."

Be open to new music and be open to changing your mind, he suggests.

When he was a boy he loved Beethoven's music, but thought Mozart was "namby pamby music, ridiculous." But when he was 16, he heard Leonard Bernstein lecture at Tanglewood about Mozart.

"Incredible. It totally changed my life," he says. "I was on my way to becoming a professional musician. I was able to appreciate the subtleties."

Mozart is very popular with the masses. But the maestro wishes audiences would stretch more and not just limit themselves to a few cherished favorites.

"I don't know if there's any way to convince people what an incredible composer Haydn was," he says. "You can sell out an all-Mozart concert, but I couldn't sell out all-Haydn. I would love to be able to do that."

You might be able to raise interest if you lectured people on Haydn and what makes his music special, he speculates.

"It's obvious he was an incredibly great composer who was able to write music that is witty and profound and learned at the same time. But it's not 'sexy' like Mozart," he says.

In other words, it wouldn't sell as well. Classical audiences in the United States aren't very willing to stretch and tend to want to hear what they already know.

The maestro would also love to put on concerts of contemporary classical music.

"Wouldn't it be nice if they would think of that kind of music as a language?" he says. "Instead of saying, 'Aw, I don't like it,' come to a series of rehearsals, seat them in the middle of the orchestra, (have them) come to all four rehearsals and see how it's put together.

"All of a sudden they start hearing connections within the music that gives them an idea of the structure and common themes that run through it. That would really be some fantastic experience. That would be something."

Listening takes effort.

"It's hard work to actually really listen," the maestro says. "It's hard work to read a Shakespeare play. If you're fed a whole bunch of pabulum then you don't think you have to work. There are many places in the U.S. people go for entertainment. Going to a concert is not an entertainment. It's not easy listening. At the same time, you have to play for your audience."

He recalls receiving a "very nice letter" from a subscriber in Naples who said, "Why do I have to listen to Prokofiev's symphony? It might be my last one. I want to hear Beethoven."

"You're tired, you play golf all day, you want to have a nice time," Maestro Mester says, explaining the mindset. But, he adds, "Certain pieces require that you give yourself over to an emotional experience that is far beyond and more profound than entertainment."

THE AUDITORY REHAB INSTRUCTOR Lisa Potts, Ph.D.

Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Mo.

Lisa Potts, Ph.D., helps the deaf hear again.

An instructor with clinical and research responsibilities at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, she works with deaf adults who've received cochlear implants.

Cochlear implants consist of a device planted in the skull by the ear working in conjunction with a microphone worn over the ear like a hearing aid.

The adults that she works with primarily have had normal hearing throughout most of their life, and then gradually lost their hearing. Sometimes there's a sudden loss.

According to Dr. Potts, a cochlear implant changes the way sound passes. It no longer comes through the ear canal, through the middle ear and into the nerve. Instead, with the implant, the hearing nerve is being stimulated directly.

"So this is a different pathway, a different type of stimulation," Dr. Potts says. "Instead of getting acoustic stimulation, they're getting electrical stimulation. It takes the place of the hair cells that are in a normal hearing ear; that's usually what quits working. A normal person has about 30,000 hair cells. And we're replacing that with about 22 electrodes."

People with cochlear implants attend auditory therapy sessions to help them interpret the sounds that they're suddenly able to hear.

"Sometimes, when the sound is first turned on, it sounds like beeps and buzzes to the person," she says. "Sometimes, as their understanding starts to build, they say the sound is cartoon-like. It doesn't have the clarity of regular speech."

Each implant can be programmed differently. It can take as many as eight or 10 sessions, each an hour or an hour and a half long, to find the best setting. While doing so the patients also undergo auditory therapy.

"We start off with detection of sound, then discrimination of sound. Then identification of words and sentences. It goes from very, very simple exercises to more complex, during the three to four months of training."

For example, they may be initially told two words, such as "foot" and "footprint," and have to determine which word is longer.

Then, they'll have two words in print in front of them, and have to determine which one the therapist says.

Next, they move on to entire sentences.

Then, they have to repeat what they hear spoken.

Patients receive 12 to 16 weeks of auditory training, meeting once a week. At home, they have to do hearing exercises every day, to build their understanding with the implant.

Adults who become deaf later in life have an advantage over children who have never heard, because they have the speaking and language foundation they learned in childhood.

Some who have undergone the process have compared it to learning a foreign language.

"It kind of is," says Dr. Potts, "but it's different in that you have to take the same sounds, same information, same sentence structure, you have to take these reduced cues, and you brain fills in the blanks."

Patients vary in how well they regain hearing.

"Focusing is extremely important," Dr. Potts says. "I tell my patients, you have to be on all the time, focused, listening, trying to fill in the blanks, whether it's context of the situation or the person's facial expression. Other people might be able to skate by, but they have to pay attention. Oftentimes, if they've had a hearing loss for very long, they've started tuning the world out, and that is a big obstacle.

"That's what makes my job so interesting. Every individual is different. Different learning styles, different aptitudes. You see that play a factor."

While cochlear implants can help recipients understand speech, it's not as effective with music.

"Most implant patients don't like the quality of the music," she says. "The sound is not natural, what they remember it being like. It's not very full. We tell them that we don't know how music will be for them."

They may grow to recognize songs they knew, but they don't sound the same. Songs they don't know can just sound like noise to them.

One of Dr. Potts's patients had been a musician in an orchestra, but now "music has no quality to her," she says. Yet another patient who was a musician still plays in his band. He plays his instrument, can differentiate notes, and knows when he's off-key.

Compared to a typical, functioning human ear, a cochlear implant is crude, she says, "but (when you consider) the way it can work, and how much understanding it can give a person when they have no hearing, it is amazing technology."
JAZZMAN
C hris Brubeck

Jazz musician, composer, The Brubeck Brothers Quartet

As a jazz musician, Chris Brubeck is familiar with all the complaints people have about jazz: it's too difficult to listen to. It doesn't make sense. It goes on and on and doesn't go anywhere. Jazz musicians are too self-indulgent and their solos go on forever.

"Here's one of my favorite stories to illustrate when someone is really listening to jazz from an ignorant point of view," he says. "I was playing with a jazz group, improvising, having a good time. Afterwards, a woman came up and said, 'I really enjoyed it. It was almost as if you were making it up as you were going along.'"

He laughs.

"From her point of view, it didn't occur to her that we could be simultaneously creating something together on the spot that sounded that good and that organized!"

Mr. Brubeck grew up surrounded by music; his father is jazz great Dave Brubeck, composer of classics such as "Take Five," the first jazz instrumental to sell more than a million copies.

Chris Brubeck plays jazz with his brother Dan in the Brubeck Brothers Quartet, and also composes. Recently, he collaborated with his father on "Ansel Adams: America," an orchestral work.

"When you see a magician cut a deck of cards, good magicians can tell the weight differential, whether their right hand has 32 cards, or what," he says. It's the same with musicians; playing and improvising is an acquired skill. They know what note and chord changes will sound good in different situations.

"When you've been doing it for 10 years, or the rest of your life, 70 years, it become a subconscious thing," he says. "A listener of jazz has to appreciate, 'Oh my God, this guy is so good, he's making up all this stuff,' a melody or its variation, sheets of sound. Coltrane would play sheets of sound. It dazzled you. It takes a lot of technique to do it, just the fingering, the mechanical technique to do it, and then the mental dexterity to think of it.

"A good jazz player is able to spontaneously go into a new place… He might listen to a drummer play an accent, and he might play in a certain way in response to it. The combination of people playing on the bandstand will respond. They will create a situation where a great jazz player will play something he has never played before.

"Any given bar you listen to, different bass notes, crazy chords and piano, and you respond. At the same time, jazz musicians or blues musicians might know a thousand licks, things they have played before in a previous situation. It's a combination of playing things that are a part of your idiom, whether it's jazz or blues, and stringing them together in new ways to make an exciting chorus, plus playing things you've never played before."

There's jazz, and then there's smooth jazz, which doesn't demand much from its listeners. When the Brubeck Brothers Quartet was making a new record, their jazz guitarist, when recording

a solo, worried that the 35th note should've been sharp or flat.

"In fact, the average person will probably say, 'Gosh, I don't know if I want to play this record when I'm eating dinner. It's this distracting fast thing going on in the background.' And that's where smooth jazz comes in, it's perfect for that background, for wallpaper."

The more modern jazz gets, the more it pushes "that gray area," Mr. Brubeck says. "It comes down to this: all rules are made to be broken… Ornette Coleman, screaming in his sax, or Coltrane; you can hear all the pain in his soul. He might be playing a note that from some other era might be 'incorrect,' but this is what makes someone a musical innovator. You play what was once thought was incorrect, with such soul and passion and intensity, that people think he has his own style and own musical voice."

If you have an open mind, you can hear something you've never heard before, he says.

"You might not understand what's going on, and think it's fascinating. I've had that experience with music from other cultures. Like the Monkey Dance from Bali, which I heard in college, and blew my mind. I loved it. It's the sound of a thousand people doing this chanting all together."

Hearing the varied patterns of staccato chanting was "powerful and bizarre and weird," he says. "You can hear stuff you don't understand. It's fascinating and you want to listen to it."

Conversely, he says it can also help to understand the technique and history behind a style of music. It's true for all genres, he says, explaining that in country music, you'll probably like Keith Urban better if you like Johnny Cash or Hank Williams.

He recalls seeing the famous acting coach, Stella Adler, on TV.

"She believed that Americans could legitimately deliver Shakespeare, despite the fact they weren't English. She said something I related to music, though she didn't know I was interpreting her words that way: 'Shakespeare's words are the vehicle for conveying an emotional truth to the audience.' And for musicians, notes are vehicles for conveying some sort of emotional truth to the audience.

"That' s why you can get a guy like Louis Armstrong, someone Wynton Marsalis worships as being a communicator of truth inside the music he plays. Emotional truth, both through his playing, his tone, and his singing. There's lots of other trumpet players that maybe can play faster, are technically dazzling, playing higher, lower. But few that can reach an audience like Louis Armstrong did.

"Ultimately, if you're a musician, what is your goal? There's an individual goal for each person, but I think one of the most honest of goals is to reach an audience and other musicians emotionally."

And also, have fun.

"It's called playing music," he says. "You don't say you are working music today. It should be a joyful, personal expression."

ANOTHER MAESTRO Toshimasa
Francis Wada

Music director/conductor of the Charlotte County Symphony

"Everybody has a different way of listening to music," says Toshimasa Francis Wada, the new music director and conductor for the Charlotte County Symphony. "I approach it as a painter, visually. That's how I approach the music. I see the colors. I try to convey that with my gestures to the orchestra, hopefully. All evening I'm painting a masterwork."

Everyone has a different way of looking at things, even a house, he says. He lives in a completely restored 100-yearold Victorian house in Massachusetts. People often drive up and ask him questions about it.

"People comment on our color combination, our architectural design, some come to look at the foundation," he says. "It hit me that listening to music is very similar, depending on your personal interest. You might be interested in colors, the exterior, or the inside. The structural design. Some people might be interested purely in the construction part of it, the foundation, what type of materials used, more analytical.

"With music, it's similar. People listen and say, 'This sounds wonderful.' Some might say, 'The way it's orchestrated is beautiful,' or 'The way it's composed is beautiful.' Everyone has a different emphasis and background to digest what they're hearing, what they're seeing."

Can a more intellectual understanding give you a more enhanced understanding of the music, he asks. Not for many people, he reasons.

"I think most people come in just to enjoy the collection of the sound, and how that's presented to the audience. It's like a flower arrangement," he says. "Five people may use the same material, depending on who placed them and how, the height is important, the location, the arrangement is different in the presenter as well as the audience who looks at it and gets different impressions."

That's where the conductor comes in, he says. Each conductor approaches each composition differently.

"I bring the more emotional sounds," Maestro Wada says. "I'm not into the French impressionistic of pastel colors, but more vivid, (it's a) more aggressive color I'm looking for. I work on emotional journey, in a concert, how I want my audience to leave at the end of the night. That's the beginning of my process, then work backwards in a way."

He wants to bring the audience on an emotional journey with the music.

"Truly, I am very concerned that my audience will have the finest experience by coming to a concert," he says.

Even if he's conducted a piece before, he'll start with a new, clean score, making notations as he goes along.

"Then comes the complexity of a conductor's job, what he does. He's like a painter. He can visualize a whole canvas before he paints, what colors go where, and what colors to combine. Painters already have whole ideas in their head before they put the first stroke of paint on the canvas. They know already all the details. That's a very similar process that conductors go through. We study an entire score, do an analysis of every little detail. Then begin to put it together structurally as well as the interior decorating. What kind of carpet, what kind of painting on which wall. That's the process we go through, it takes a long time, it seems never ending."

After making his notations, he then looks at his old scores, reading the notes he made 15 or 20 years ago.

"It's fascinating: I come to different interpretations now than 20 years ago. Why did I do it that way? Why do I feel this way now that I didn't feel then? It's just a fascinating journey. It goes back to the emotional journey. Intellectually, I tend to find more detail that I missed (earlier). Analytically, it gets more detailed. The emotional aspect depends upon what I went through in the last 10 years. Did I have a tragedy? I sure did. Did I have a great happy moment? I sure did. I use this to interpret the musical notes. All these factors come together to create the best possible way for that moment. That's the reason I always approach every music as if I'd never done it before.

"It's never the same."

He doesn't know if he has the answer for how people can listen to classical music, because people are so varied in their taste. He suggests they do a sampling, perhaps starting with the Baroque era, whose music has a more simplistic structure and might be easier to understand, then move up to the romantic period, then to contemporary music.

But there's nothing like attending a live performance. Today, you can hear performances on CDs, DVDs, YouTube, he says.

"But nothing can replace a live performance. You're surrounded by the music. It's performed just for you. It's like having a private caterer making a special meal for you. You experience the environment with every sense you have. Then see if you like it or not. There's nothing like exploring yourself.

"Anybody can approach classical music if they're open minded about it and they're willing to attend a live concert."