The manner of listening the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA) requires is very much a contemplative practice, and listening is essential to the SEA approach to musical understanding. The SEA asks that one simply listen openly and then recall sounds and energies heard. This framework for listening is subtly different from how we are typically encouraged to listen when trying to understand music. Musical training helps us narrow our focus almost exclusively to the subtleties of pitch and rhythm, a very important kind of training, but the energies of music come from many more sources than just pitch. It is helpful to start from a broader perspective.
As I am putting together a book on the SEA, I’m starting to call it a framework for understanding music rather than a theory, because it asks that we fundamentally reorient our thinking about music toward considerations of musical energy, toward the many factors that create it. Music is a phenomenon of sound energy over time, and all of the world’s musical traditions can be considered as such. Any sort of music theory ought to relate to music as heard, and should render an account of music in terms of its energy.
There is of course more to the framework, especially in that it allows a means for incorporating the energy contributed by any musical parameter into the process of composing, analysis, and listening. I named the Just Listening workshop, developed to embody the principles of the SEA, as I did because the manner of listening I advocate so resembles the meditation practice known as Shikantaza, or Just Sitting. The practice of sitting among the many distractions of consciousness without becoming engaged in a particular thought is quite similar to listening to music openly, not allowing one’s mind to get caught up in thinking about liking or disliking an event, sound, or style but rather absorbing the entirety of the music. There is a favorite Buddhist text of mine that states “absorbing world sounds awakens a Buddha right here”. A very inspiring thought for me, as I have repeatedly witnessed insight arise from the Just Listening process! Full, open listening is not that easy to maintain, however. I know that when I listen and really like something, start thinking about it, I am no longer listening fully. Likewise (or more so) with disliking something.
A central Buddhist text is the Heart Sutra. It goes on and on about how giving in to likes and dislikes pulls one off the path, to the point that many find the text hard to understand, seemingly impossible to realize. But given my realization regarding listening stated above, it becomes clear that the pull of like or dislike is to push me off balance, to tilt me against full hearing and into not listening. This is not to say that one is not aware of details when listening in this manner; in fact, with practice, one can remember quite a bit of detail as well. The path is not easy, we are so prone to thinking. Practice is required: one must return again and again to reorient oneself to the open focus, whether in listening or meditating.
When I learned of Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practices, I came across her concept of focal and global listening, and found it reassuring to be on a similar wavelength. Oliveros’s global listening includes anything in the aural spectrum, extending out to the universe. I would place my concept somewhere between that and her focal listening. Focal listening is what musicians are trained to develop, and it’s essential for immersion in a tradition, or hearing more and more deeply into music.
I would therefore call the open listening I advocate holistic listening, listening to the whole before diving into listening for something: for components, for harmony, for the shape of a given parameter through the piece, and so forth. When I do this with groups, whether graduate students in composition or people in assisted living, what people do remember is telling. People tend to remember what they especially like or dislike, of course, and either reaction points to a strong element of the music heard, constituting a first step in understanding.
The SEA process relies on repeated listening, with discussion of what is remembered between listenings an essential component. In this way, it has a lot of similarity with Oliveros’s practices: she stated several times that discussion of the listening experience deepens it. Talking about what is heard builds community as well, and thus relates to the long history of music’s importance in community-building.
One more important aspect of the listening embodied in the SEA approach is balancing holistic and focal listening. As in so many things, the middle path, finding a balance between extremes, enables deeper and deeper experience. That is true for me in sitting meditation: long suffering from a lower back injury, it has taken me years to find real balance, and as that balance emerges over time, I gain inestimable benefits to my consciousness. If I only listen to a piece with broad, holistic focus, my understanding takes a long time to deepen. Analyzing music through listening very much requires the back and forth of focal and holistic listening. Keeping the focus of musical analysis on what is heard keeps our understanding grounded in audible reality, and helps cut short flights of fancy that often arise from score study alone.