Yesterday, my 23 year old daughter had her T-Tubes removed from her ears. She’d had hearing troubles and ear infections since early childhood. Four rounds of intervention had failed to sort the problem, so the last set were finally removed after 15 uncomfortable and frustrating years.
As I sat and waited for her to be brought back to the ward, I began thinking about her struggles with hearing and how they had impacted her education, confidence and communication skills.
As it happened, just a week prior to the operation, I had been teaching a session on our philosophical leadership course about the nature of conversation and dialogue, particularly their capacity for certain kinds of recognition. We explored the difficult, risky, and joyful aspects of conversation, including what it means to listen carefully to another, and the humanity that might be carried and deepened in such a connection.
Everything is Connected
At the end of the session we turned to the remarkable book Everything is Connected: The Power of Music, by the Argentine-Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The book is informed by his work with the West-Eastern Divan orchestra which he founded in 1999 with the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said. The orchestra was established to bring Arab and Israeli musicians together as an alternative way to address the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The orchestra expresses not only the ongoing difficulty of recognition where there is conflict or a history of trauma and oppression, but how music – as a form of dialogue, as movement and change, as that difficult mix of discipline and freedom – can be itself that work of recognition. It continues to tour to this day, and the remarkable dialogues that have taken place between its musicians over the years, some of which have been published in the book An Orchestra Beyond Borders: Voices of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, are testament to the difficult but hopeful work that these musicians continue to risk for humanity and for peace.
The Intelligent Ear
The book orients itself around Barenboim’s concept of the ‘intelligent ear’. Biologically, we think of the ear as the primary organ through which sound vibrations are translated into nerve impulses that the brain can process as auditory images. But the ear is doing so much more, as Barenboim reminds us. It’s translating or processing of sound is really ‘an entire creative process of thought’. The ear and the brain are working together to make sense of the world, just as the eye is doing when it converts the light that enters it into visual images. Sense perception, in other words, is not merely the receiving of external stimuli, but intelligible life. It seems that there is order, pattern and coherence in the material world calling out to be understood and imagined. And hearing, like the other senses, is one of the essential ingredients for that intelligibility.
Memory and Recollection
But memory, writes Barenboim, is crucial here. We speak about different kinds of memory, like the memory that helps us acquire certain skills or knowledge over time. This might be visual, auditory, motoric. There is also the memory that shapes the knowledge of who and what we are, or ‘the memory that I am’, as Augustine famously explores it. But memory only has significance for us as education or self-knowledge when we are recollecting and not simply remembering. Barenboim is clear that memory requires interpretation by thought or reflection if it is to do more than merely repeat or reproduce something mechanically. Without this thinking element we can have a good memory and with it a genuine ability, but this is not ‘intelligence’ in the sense of that curious intuition, examination and interpretation of the shifting data of our memory in time. As Rowan Williams in his examination of Augustine suggests, the activity of making sense is not so much ‘spatial’, as in the thought of an observed object, but temporal. Consciousness attends to ‘the drifts of sequences’ in its experience, the ‘half-grasped or half-recollected connections’[1] which shape it through time.
We might say, then, that the recollecting consciousness does not simply remember what the memory holds, but ‘re-cognises’ what is remembered. In other words, thought has made a difference to the immediate experience. And this, as the philosopher Gillian Rose reminds us in Hegel Contra Sociology, is what the prefix ‘re’ of re-cognition and re-collection tells us. The mere remembering of something is too immediate, too pre-critical. Whereas the ‘re’ of recognition implies that the immediate experience is incomplete and has to be re-experienced or thought again in order to be ‘well-known’.
Take playing a familiar piece of music, for example. As we play, we are at the same time ‘calling up’ the notes that are still to come. Now we could take this to mean that the future notes are passing through the present and into the past. But what we are actually doing here is ‘recalling’ the notes to come. They are in my memory, my past, the piece is something I have already learned, something I ‘had’. But because I still ‘have’ it I must be holding what was and what is together not as a finished piece that I can conjure up before me, but as something that is ‘re-cognising itself’, or, we might say, ‘growing into itself’ as I discover the piece it already is.
Williams suggests that what we ‘have implicitly in mind [is] a whole process which gradually slips from future anticipation into memory’[2] and vice versa. My present awareness is the memory which expects or anticipates the notes that are not yet, but that anticipation is at the same time passing away into the memory which is changed by what it is learning (and playing) in the present. Recollection here, as Nigel Tubbs argues, has an educational character and structure because what is not (the past) is an absence or negation preserved in recollection. And the truth of that which is negated and preserved, he writes, is learning.[3]
Similarly, for Barenboim, hearing creates this ‘link between the present and the past and sends signals to the brain as to what to expect of the future.’[4] We hear in and through the time which keeps us moving forwards. But parallel to this progression the ear is remembering what it has heard, it is simultaneously ‘moving backwards’ and this is what gives us the ability to be ‘conscious in the present and the past at once.’[5] But only the ‘completion of auditory memory’ by rational reflection makes this recollection formative. When we ‘hear’ a piece of music, the laws of sound, time and space are operating with every note. No note can be a simple repetition. The listener must ‘attend’ to the succession and pattern of notes, the shifting relationship between sound and silence. Hearing, then, is a matter of intelligence not in the sense of intellectual or conceptual knowledge, but simply as the matter of thoughtful attention, in time.
Williams reminds us that the same process is at work when we are speaking; ‘the syllables of a word, the words of a sentence, have to ‘vanish’ for the sequence to build up and do what it is meant to do’. Meaning depends on the negation, displacement and preservation of sound, or the ‘accumulation of sound as succession’.[6] Even if hearing, like any one of our human senses, is impaired, the brain areas normally used for that sense are repurposed to process the other senses by which this happens. We know that deaf individuals often experience heightened peripheral vision and spatial awareness because the brain repurposes parts of the auditory cortex to process visual and somatosensory (touch) stimuli instead. The point is that recollection is at the heart of human experience and growth, which is why it also constitutes the human dimension of music.
The owl of Minerva
There is a famous example in philosophy of this kind of recollection. In Hegel’s owl of Minerva metaphor [7] philosophy’s comprehension is a recollective one. The owl (philosophy) ‘spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’ which means it can only reflect on the day, only understand what the day has taught it. It always arrives on the scene too late to tell us what ‘ought’ to be. But there is an additional aspect to the metaphor. The owl flies at dusk in retrieving the days’ events, but not merely as hindsight or critical reflection. Rather, it is changed by what is lost and what is preserved in its recollection or it is changed by what it learns, and this change is its originality and its beginning. Recollection in the present is formative of the past and the future carried within it.
The problem Barenboim goes on to articulate in the book is that modern life has neglected the sense of hearing. Music is largely about entertainment, or it is reduced to background noise. We are encouraged to ‘hear’ and not to ‘listen’, or, as he puts it, to hear ‘without thought’. Furthermore, modern life has become impatient with the passage of time, and with the ways in which time limits and shapes us. Music, he writes, teaches us about the relationship between content and time, that speed determines the effectiveness of a piece and changes the reality it communicates within. The same is true of the timing and speed of a political process. They are ‘not external factors but ones which irrevocably change the shape of things to come’.[8]
Music and Life
So, can the cultivation of musical intelligence teach us to have patience with time? Can it help us to live with, and not in opposition to, each other? It’s not surprising that Barenboim’s answer to this would be an emphatic yes. He sees the education of the musical ear as integral to a social and political life confident in its ability to sustain the work of difference, diversity and conflict. But this is because music is inherently dialogical, with two voices often in dialogue at the same time, ‘each one expressing itself to the fullest, while at the same time listening to the other’.[9] The skills required here – discipline and freedom – are the same as those required for any kind of harmonious life. The discipline which imposes order, pattern, or which acknowledges relationship, and the freedom which is movement, expression and passion, brought to bear on each other, are the truth and sustainability of the whole, just as in music they are the truth of the composition and its performance. But perhaps this is the most difficult lesson for human beings, he writes, ‘learning to live with discipline yet with passion, with freedom yet with order’.[10] But, together, as evident in any single phrase of music, they constitute the struggle to ‘say something, often something humane’[11] as Adorno said of the language of music.
‘The ability to hear several voices at once, comprehending the statement of each separate one; the capacity to recollect a theme that made its first entrance before a long process of transformation and now reappears in a different light; and the aural skill of recognising the geometrical variations of a fugue subject are all qualities that enhance understanding. Perhaps the cumulative effect of these skills and abilities could form human beings more apt to listen to and understand several points of view at once, more able to judge their own place in society and in history, and more likely to apprehend the similarities between all people rather than the differences between them.’[12]
We do not need to become accomplished musicians or concert pianists to develop this kind of musical intelligence. Research has shown that ensemble playing at any level of experience or schooling requires and develops those same aural skills of active listening and dialogue. When Barenboim and Said founded the orchestra, it was with the knowledge that playing music together encouraged people to express themselves as individuals whilst also listening carefully to others. This dialogical quality was the inspiration for musicians in the orchestra to discover the common ground that exists most deeply between people who are estranged or shaped by bitter division and conflict.
‘With excitement we witnessed what happened when an Arab musician shared a music stand with an Israeli musician, both trying to play the same note with the same dynamic, the same stroke of the bow, the same sound, the same expression. They were trying to do something together about which they were both passionate because, after all, indifference and music making cannot coexist… The fundamental principle of the orchestra was quite simple: once the young musicians agreed on how to play even just one note together they would not be able to look at each other in the same way again. If, in music, they were able to carry on a dialogue by playing simultaneously, then ordinary verbal dialogue in which one waits until the other has finished would become considerably easier.’[13]
The West-Eastern Divan orchestra continues to witness to the remarkable power of music to change people and situations. It teaches that harmony is always a dialogue between the ear and rational understanding, between the head and heart, and that discipline and freedom are the sinews of such dialogical encounters.
As my daughter’s ears were adjusting to what felt like an assault of pitches and sounds following the operation, we spoke (quietly) about the difference between how we hear and how we listen. She spoke about how difficult conversations can be sometimes, how increasingly hard it is to give your attention to something without distraction, or to what someone is actually saying without trying to seize the conversation for yourself. She was aware of the impact that not being listened to has on our self-worth, our confidence, our ability to connect, to learn together. She lamented not creating more spaces for silence in her life.
On the way home from the hospital, my daughter didn’t ask to play her own playlist over mine as she usually does. She needed the quiet. Perhaps the ear was taking advantage for a moment of the time and space opened up for it’s deeper listening.
References
[1] Williams, R. (2016) On Augustine, London: Bloomsbury, 2.
[2] Ibid, 1.
[3] Nigel Tubbs is Emeritus Professor of philosophy and education at University of Winchester. His most recent publication Socrates On Trial imagines what might happen if Socrates returned to a modern city (the polis) to find a society divided by power, privilege and prejudice. His teaching and publications explore how the relationship between philosophy and education affects the concept of ‘the teacher’, the concept of ‘education,’ the definition of what counts as ‘philosophy’, and the shape of the history of western philosophy more generally. His publications include Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts: Freedom is to Learn, and God, Education, and Modern Metaphysics.
[4] Barenboim, D. (2008) Everything is Connected, London, Verso, 26.
[5] Ibid, 23.
[6] Williams, On Augustine, 2.
[7] ‘One more word about giving instruction as to what the world should be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history’s inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads it wings only with the falling of the dusk.’ Hegel, G.W.F. (1967) Philosophy of Right, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 12-13.
[8] Barenboim, Everything is Connected, 17.
[9] Ibid, 18.
[10] Ibid, 21.
[11] Adorno, T. ‘Music, Language and Composition’ in Leppert, R. (ed)(2002) Essays on Music, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 113.
[12] Barenboim, Everything is Connected, 36.
[13] Ibid, 51.
