Why Can't Musicians Listen?
There's more to music than just playing well!
For as much as musicians use their ears, there’s a surprising lack of accurate, sincere, and compassionate listening that happens among us.
Or maybe it’s not so surprising at all, considering the hesitancy musicians feel to talk about anything at all that’s not music itself (even if it’s immediately, immediately adjacent to music like listening).
This deficiency is perpetuated by people who don’t understand (probably because nobody talks about) the fact that there’s a lot more that goes into being a successful musician than just being able to play your instrument well.
In fact, you can go through your entire collegiate musical education believing this, and no one will feel the need to correct you. No, the only things anyone will ever tell you that you need to work on to become the musician you want to be is “practice more, harder, better, faster, stronger, longer, no, you’re not doing it right, if it’s not working it’s your fault. What do you mean your body hurts? What do you mean you’re miserable? What do you mean you don’t want to be a musician anymore!?
Well then get out of here if you can’t take the pressure!”
And then we have the audacity to wonder why artists doubt themselves and have so much crippling anxiety.
I don’t want to play the blame game, but I have certainly met some music teachers who have decided that intelligent listening and good communication aren’t required to be a good teacher. This is evidenced by their use of shortcut statements like “swing,” “emotion,” “feeling,” and “je ne sais quoi,” to try to get you to understand what to fix. Then when that doesn’t work, they’ll wash their hands of responsibility for it saying “I tried,” as if repeating mindless, meaningless phrases has anything to do with “trying.”
And what’s worse is that now it’s your fault for not understanding, you heathen.
To be sure, I’ve met other music teachers who seemed to be heaven-sent angels, so this is by no means a generalization.
But if you’re a student of music for long enough, you will almost certainly encounter both types of teachers and the negative kind of teacher will probably have a bigger impact on you (‘cause that’s just how humans are hard-wired).
So what do we do?
The short answer is this: tell everyone who doesn’t listen to shove it, and actually listen to people who talk to you, damn it.
But just in case you want to listen to me ramble on about this in more detail…
Here we go.
Not Listening
As I mentioned earlier, many musicians get caught up in practicing their instruments as if that were the only thing necessary to have success.
This is called “tunnel vision” and is generally considered to be a bad thing.
Many musicians apparently think that this is not the case, though, and celebrate and brag about their so-called achievements like practicing for hours and hours with no breaks even at the expense of their physical health and sanity.
For once, I agree with the conventional wisdom. Tunnel vision is, indeed, a bad thing.
Tunnel vision has a habit of metastasizing into other senses like the ears which then leads to “selective hearing.”
Please keep in mind that “selective hearing” used to just be called “not listening” until the narcissists narcified it. I generally like to refrain from using cutesy euphemisms for things that are extremely problematic and debatably evil, though, so we’re just going to call it “not listening.”
I don’t think you need me to paint the picture of why this is a very bad habit for musicians, but here are a few points on why this may be even worse than you think:
When your creative journey halts, you stop having new experiences.
When you stop having new experiences, you stop maturing and growing.
When you stop growing, you get stuck thinking the same things and doing the same things over and over (repetition, again!).
When you’re repeating things endlessly, and without any new ideas to break up the monotony, your life becomes devoid of life.
And that’s, like, really bad.
And could maybe kill you.
Not to mention the fact that not listening to other people is
Really rude
Gaslighting-adjacent if not full on gaslighting.
Immature
And I hate it. And you wouldn’t want to upset me, would you? After all, I’m not above committing arson.
“But Emma! Musicians listen all the time! They have to in order to do what they do!”
That’s just it, though, my made-up, interjecting friend.
They don’t.
Musicians will profess to listen. They will gaslight themselves into thinking they’re listening. They will pretend to listen in the hopes that somehow reality will be gaslit into accepting their false oblations.
But they will not actually listen.
Because real listening requires intelligence, and mindless, tunnel vision-y habits are a far cry from an adequate substitute.
Intelligent Listening
Alright, so how do we recover from Terminal Not Listening Disorder™?
The first thing is to snap out of the daze of repetition. Go on, snap out of it!
The second thing is to start paying attention.
So many people seem to believe that life is just a monotonous grind where you wake up every morning and do the same thing every day. You talk to the same people, have the same conversations, and eat the same food. Then there’s the advice to counter that kind of tedium: take a different route to work than you usually do, talk to someone else, try a different restaurant, etc.
Those are all great, but they’re missing the extremely low hanging fruit that’s right in front of your eyes.
And that’s actually listening.
When you actually listen to people who you’re talking to, you basically get to see another world. Theirs.
A word to the wise here, not everyone’s world is pretty. In fact, some people’s worlds are downright ugly. These are the people who believe antihuman, nihilistic, eugenicist, deterministic, or ascetic things for any assortment of reasons.
But when you actually listen to these people and you don’t just shut your ears off because you think you’ve heard this one before, or because you think that’s backwards and deplorable, or they prefer red team over the blue team in government (or vice versa), or you’ve taught it this way for 100 years and come hell or high water you’re going to continue to teach it that way even if they’re not understanding it…
We will find that people are a lot more interesting than we perhaps originally thought. This has certainly been the case for me.
And also as a bonus you get to discover whether or not someone is a narcissist without having to go through all the heartache, trauma, and awfulness the long way.
Yeet.
Communication
Listening isn’t the only thing we need to be able to do well as musicians, though.
The next step is communicating well.
Fun fact: listening and communication are both on my short-list of “skills that everyone needs that people take for granted and don’t really develop beyond the most rudimentary levels that if they actually bothered to learn how to do really well would vastly improve life for themselves and everyone they interact with ever.”
Yes, that is a real list of mine.
Other items on the list include:
Observing
Organizing
Thinking
Reading
But that’s neither here nor there. Leave a comment if you’d like me to talk about any of those, though. Or don’t and I probably will anyway. Because I guess I just really like to hear myself talk.
Back to communication. It is, indeed, one of the most “bang for your buck” skills you can develop.
So! In the hopes that perhaps what I write will inspire someone to learn to communicate better, here are basic principles for large-scale communications (compositions, substack articles)
Only say one thing. Not 2, not 10. This is your “thesis” so to speak.
Organize what you have to say, make sure that every point you have supports the central “thesis” or main idea of whatever you’re writing, and that the points follow each other logically.
Say it in a clear, concise way. Every note, every word, or every inflection you added should add to the overall message of the piece you’re creating.
Cut side-tangents and save them for future pieces.
And then adapted for small-scale communications (conversation, improvisation)
Know what you’re actually tying to say before you start talking (or playing).
Be intentional with the words and notes you use. Don’t just say things for the sake of conversation. Make sure you actually mean them.
Stay aware of your surroundings and the people you’re conversing with. This seems obvious, but too many people slip back into “selective hearing” or “tunnel vision” during conversations to not bring this up. While improvising, stay aware of the other musicians you’re playing with and the audience.
Be aware of the tone of your voice and any emotions you’re feeling. Are you stressed out? Is your voice strained? Are you tired? Are you nervous about your performance? Note those emotions and see if you can figure out how to do better next time. Also work on being observant enough to know when your feelings of defensiveness are coming from the stories you’re making up in your own head rather than the other person.
Learning to properly communicate, organize what you have to say, and say it in a clear, concise way, can help you no matter what kind of anything you do.
A Quick Note On Communicating With Narcy-Narcs
Narcissists are exceptionally poor at communicating properly.
Their favorite habit is to conflate any criticism of themselves with an attack on their personhood. If you bring up something that you feel like they could do better, they immediately launch into accusations. E.g. “So you think I’m a terrible person?!” “Well what about the time that you did something bad too!?”
This is an excellent example of what not to do when you’re trying to communicate with someone.
Other examples of what not to do include:
Put words in someone’s mouth
Ask leading questions.
Be accusatory.
Assume they mean something they didn’t actually say.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just narcissists that do these things during communication. I see it all the time.
Really, though. All the time. You've probably seen this happen just today!
When someone is used to communicating with people who use deceptive language to speak, you start to see them adopt other troublesome communication techniques, like
Hypervigilantly anticipating someone’s needs or wants before they actually ask for things.
Censoring what you have to say to conform with unspoken “rules” that can’t be mentioned or defined.
Assuming that no one wants to hear what you have to say.
And the list goes on.
Just like always, the narcy-narcs mess up everything they touch. So don’t be like them. Be like my old pal Jesus: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”1
Final Thoughts
“Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul, be just another human soul.” -Carl Jung
When musicians get trapped into a cycle of saying or doing the same things over and over, the true art of musical communication gets buried under mounds of notes that don’t actually mean anything.
Ironically, this negates the entire purpose of music, which is to communicate something that is ephemeral and beyond words. And for all I’ve said about listening and communication, the real TL;DR is to remember to be a real person. Feel your emotions genuinely, and play from the heart.
And who knows? If we take the time to actually listen to other people, maybe eventually we’ll end up taking the time to listen to what’s really inside our own hearts.
Matthew 5:37