Art of listening – The National

MUSIC

There and where of music

By ANDREW MOUTU
ONE of the things that came through while writing the tribute in honour of the late John Warbat (1962-2024) is the manner in which he learnt the art of a rock guitarist through the art of listening.
There appears to be two kinds of art forms that coincide in his musical biography. One involves an obvious mastery of the guitar and the other involves a subtle art of listening.
As an art form, guitar playing requires a mastery of skills including finger dexterity, hand-eye coordination and the bowing techniques that articulate and set the tone and mood of a particular song. These skills are learned through practice and repetition just as an athlete would do with training and exercises. The late Warbat was known for his notorious exercises on guitar chords, notes and an intriguing range of tones.
The physical instrument of a guitar tells us that all sounds always originate from a material origin and their deciphering means that sounds always drag and bring along their origins with them.
Every sound that we hear came or originated from somewhere. Listening to, decoding or deciphering a sound causes one to go back momentarily with a mental trace of where that sound came from to understand its structure and sentiment.
Sound travels and passes through. Listening to a sound does not stop its flow like it might to the sound of flying foxes with their flapping echoes inside the walls of a cave. For an artist like the late John Warbat, the art of listening is a crystallised moment of discernment where he reflects on what he has heard and can make his choices to emulate or deviate from his relationship with what he has been listening to. This makes listening an act of interpretation as compared to speaking which is an act of translation.
Warbat listened to tape recorded music on cassette players, on radio and occasionally he watched video music. Listening was an indispensable method to his learning. Through listening, he learnt how musical notes and melody lines are produced. These are then archived and retained in his auditory memory.
In reflections, recollections and in moments of reproduction, he would return back and retrieve some of those notes from his auditory memory and reproduce them with a stylised inflection in retrospect.
The diligence he gives to learning epitomised by his adage of sleeping and waking up with his guitar indicates that his two eyes maybe closed while sleeping but his two ears are always open by the art of listening.
To listen is to give attention to the meaning of sound and its sentimental value and to make decisions about how the meaning or the sentimental value of such a sound might next flow on again in the where and there of music for instance.
Creative power from listening
Imagine the agency of those who listen and the value their creative power of listening recreates. The art of listening carefully holds out the possibility of a gain in wealth or health, in enhancing our skills and prowess and in creating valuable connections with the wider world.
If listening is an art, then it requires knowledge and effort. Enabled by our primary sense of hearing, listening is an extended ability that can be heightened with training and practice.
The musical episteme of the late John Warbat is based on a juxtaposition of the two arts in which he is placed side by side with the art of a guitar and the art of listening.

**Late John Warbat doing what he was best known for.**

Stethoscope and listening
The imagery of such a juxtaposition makes me to recall the historical account of how the stethoscope appeared in the medical art of listening. The need and value for listening to the sound of our heart’s breathing predates the development of medicine in ancient Greece.
The Greek “father of medicine” Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who pioneered methods of prognosis and clinical observations and in categorising different kinds of diseases, taught his students the art of listening to the sounds of the heart in a person. This laid the foundations for the development of precise clinical meanings of breath and heart sounds subsequently.
In the early 1800s, French physician Rene Laennec (171-1826) created the first stethoscope which is now used by medical doctors everywhere. In those days they used the method of percussion, which involved striking the chest with one’s fingertips or placing an ear against the chest of a patient to help diagnose in pathologic processes inside the body of a sick patient. Laennec was critical of this art of listening to the heart.
One day while he was returning to the hospital (Louvre) where he was working, he came across a group of children playing atop a pile of timber in the court. One of the boys would hold up a piece of timber to his ear and the other would tap the nails on the opposite end of the timber to transmit sound. It was this science of acoustics that inspired Laennec to invent the stethoscope.
While this invention was one of the most eureka moments in the history of modern medicine, it was based on the simple understanding that sound is conveyed through solid bodies.
However, just as the stethoscope may lose its technical value over time and find its place in museums, the guitar will also change and adapt to new technologies of sound and sentiment in the art of listening.
The art of listening that the late John Warbat exhibits certain values and methods. These include: Discipline (perpetual mood of listening); concentration (patience with one-self); and comprehension (grasping the authentic idea of what is being heard).
All of these values and methods are at once personal and social in the sense that a sound can be heard privately but how it is interpreted and shared often extend and transcend the life and experiences of an individual listener.
For listening to become an art, one must participate in its whole process including our capacity to listen even with our inner perceptions of sound in particular and understanding in general. It requires us to be catholic and embracing, that our eyes and ears are always open to how others receive and listen to the sounds that we produce, improvise and expand on.
The art of listening and its beauty and fecundity originates from a state of zest, where mutual vitality is enhanced with a desire to share, commune and inspire others.

Dr Andrew Moutu is a freelance writer.