With Head or Heart? By Thomas Wolf

How do you listen to music – with your head or with your heart? 

Think carefully about the question I have posed above. Here is another way I might ask it: when you listen to music, do you tend to analyze and think critically about what you are hearing (head)? Or is music listening pretty much an emotional experience for you—something that can tingle your spine or make you cry (heart)? Don’t rush your answer. But before reading further, answer that question for yourself and then recall your thoughts after reading what follows.

I am often surprised by who is a head person and who a heart person when it comes to music. A colleague of mine—someone who knows at least as much about music as I do—wrote to me recently about what it is like to be “transported to further realms by the magic of the mystical process of live music, an inexplicable transport of a message from the dead composer through the agency of the personality of the performer into the soul of the listeners, or at least the ones susceptible to it.”  If people have this experience, he went on, “it would be better than any drug or religious ecstasy, and they would want more.”

I was astonished.  The man is a scholar on whom I depend for much of my historical information about music and musicians.  But this sounded to me like pure heart—a totally emotional response to music. It was certainly not the way I experience music most of the time.  Generally, I am fascinated by the architecture of a great composition—the way it is put together, the imagination of the composer in his use of melody and harmony, the balance of how individual parts contribute to the whole, and how the piece is characteristic of a particular period or style or form.  If I don’t know the work, I love playing a game of elimination to figure out who the composer is by using deductive techniques. I am often fascinated, too, by how a performer handles musical expression and technical challenges.  It is pretty much a head approach to listening.

But I admit that on occasion, I can be transported as my friend is.  I cannot listen to Schubert’s magnificent song, “Erlking,” without shivers going up and down my spine.

In the song, based on a text by Goethe, a father is carrying his son on horseback by night when they are overtaken by a supernatural being, the erlking.  The panic of the child grows and grows while the father, seemingly oblivious of the erlking, tries to reassure his son.  But at last, when the child is seized by the erlking, he cries out to his father one more time and the moment is electric. The song ends incredibly with the father’s discovery that the child is dead.  The piano accompaniment throughout is extraordinary in building tension, the ending sublime.  I sometimes feel my knees shaking. Here is a video of the song and you can follow a translation of the text as it is sung.

So I guess in the head-heart balance, I can go either way depending on the music.

Perhaps it is because I spent many years as a performing flutist and had to work hard to figure out how to play things well that analysis is so close to the surface for me.  Imagine the thought process in working through difficult passages and playing them hundreds of times.  “Which fingering should I use for that B flat if I want the passage to be smooth [there are three fingerings to choose from]?”  “How can I bring down the pitch of that high A natural so it is in tune with the clarinet?”  “Should I play the repeat of that passage differently for more variety?” and so on.  Without a great leap, such analysis can migrate to my listening.

I was thinking about this question of head versus heart recently as I was reading a fascinating book by George Saunders called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Saunders offers seven classic Russian short stories (they are all reproduced in their entirety in his book) and then analyzes them as if he were teaching his seminar to short story writers at Syracuse University.  In going through the volume. I realized that when it comes to reading literature, I may be much more of a heart person than when I listen to music.  One of the stories Saunders analyzes is Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” which has always been particularly special to me (it, along with another of the Russian author’s masterpieces, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” are my two favorite Tolstoy short stories and both always elicit a strong emotional response as I return to them again and again).  In Saunders’ analysis, I was alternately fascinated and upset.  Sure, it is great to understand the craft of writing a short story but when it comes to a story which I adore and to which I am emotionally attached, I want to be left alone.

One particularly upsetting section of Saunders’ analysis has to do with the end of “Master and Man.”  The rich master—a selfish and self-absorbed landowner—and one of his peasants, Nikita, are caught in a violent snowstorm.  Initially, the master tries to save himself by leaving Nikita behind.  But when after a time he realizes he has gone in a circle and comes upon Nikita lying in the snow and dying, a transformation takes place and eventually the master sacrifices himself to save the poor servant.  Nikita, with the dead and frozen master lying on top of him, is rescued the next morning and lives another twenty years.

The landowner’s thoughts as he covers Nikita with his body and with his ample fur coat are described in detail by Tolstoy.  However, Nikita’s thoughts the next morning and in the subsequent years leading up to his death are hardly described at all.  Saunders sees this as a possible failure on Tolstoy’s part and suggests a different kind of ending with Nikita’s thoughts more explicitly recounted. He even suggests that his readers try rewriting the ending.

“No, no, no,” I yelled as I read Saunders pitch for a different ending (my wife, Dennie, wondered what was wrong with me). Then I thought: “Tolstoy’s ending is so beautiful and perfect. It made me cry the first time I read it. It is exquisitely simple and emotionally satisfying.  Don’t analyze it, don’t try to change it, just love it for what it is!”  Clearly the way I read literature (at least some literature) is far more from the heart than the way I listen to music.

Finally, there is visual art.  Here I would love to have a Saunders-like expert as my guide.  I am often totally at sea and will welcome any descriptive and analytical assistance I can get. Despite taking an art history course in college, I am not a skilled observer.  I don’t notice important things in a painting no matter how hard I try unless they are pointed out to me. When I walk through an art museum unaccompanied, I can often be overwhelmed by what I am looking at, unable to understand at some deep level why a particular painting is considered important or great.  Like many people, I read whatever descriptive scraps of information I am offered, often spending more time with wall text than looking at art.  When I am accompanied by an expert, I am thrilled to be shown elements that I never noticed before—things about composition, use of color, brush strokes, and the treatment of subject matter.  There are people who may have an emotional experience when they stand in front of a painting, though I am not one of them and I find it difficult to imagine.

So what is it like for you—is it head or heart…or both—sometimes one, sometimes the other?  Is it different for various art forms for you as it is for me? I suppose that there is no one right way to gain aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment. And that’s probably a good thing.