I am indebted to Zen master Jim Wilson, former abbot of the Chogye Zen Center in New York City and currently a Bay Area Dharma teacher, for the basic outline and impetus for this essay. His essay “The Tao of Reading” aims at elucidating a harmonized, centered approach to reading scriptural literature, in particular the vast canon of Buddhist scripture. I was deeply impressed with the applicability of Jim’s essay to the act of listening to music in a way that encourages growth and centering rather than just listening to satisfy the course requirements.

With Jim’s gracious permission (and encouragement) I have adapted “The Tao of Reading” to the needs of undergraduate students taking a survey course in the history and culture of Western art music. I offer it in the hope that it might be found useful.

There are ways of pursuing simple, everyday activities which transform those activities into conditions for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth.

There is a way of serving tea which transforms it into conditions for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth: it is the Tao of Tea, or Chado.

There is a way of arranging flowers which transforms it into conditions for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth: it is the Tao of Flowers, or Kado.

There is a way of archery which transforms it into conditions for emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth: it is called the Tao of Archery, or Kyodo.

There is a way of exercise which transforms it into conditions of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth: such exercise forms include Tai Chi Chuan, Chi Kung (QiGong), and many other systems of bodily movement.

And there is a way of listening to music which transforms it from a passive act into conditions of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth: I call it the Tao of Listening.

This essay presents several dozen procedures and methods for helping to make the Tao of Listening comprehensible and accessible.

1.      Listen slowly

In college study there is a great deal of pressure to read fast, to study fast, to carry out a great variety of activities in a vanishingly short amount of time. This is an unfortunate fact of college life, and not something that this essay can change in any significant way.

But it is possible to take a time out from the pressures of college life, even if a short time. This ‘time out’ can consist of doing one activity slowly, one thing carefully or without a goal of cramming in as much as possible in as short of a time as possible.

So I like to recommend that the listening be considered as a respite from speed, from trying to ‘learn’ in a short time. This isn’t about learning, or studying: listening is all about absorbing at your own natural pace.

2.      Rushing is a state of mind

As a corollary to the preceding item, I would like to point out that it is possible to do a great deal without being rushed or hectic. Words like rushed, rushing, hectic, frantic, frenetic, stressed are all states of mind and not states of being.

Try to cultivate a mind that spots the signs of fires building up—the fires of rushing, frenzy, stress—and is able to extinguish them quickly, without comment or remorse or judgment. Then carry on with your work.

3.      Put aside your mental highlighting pen

In textbook study, the ubiquitous yellow highlighting pen is a way of extracting the most significant-seeming points out of the text, in order to save time and effort and (we hope) receive a higher mark on the forthcoming examination. It is far too easy to apply this attitude to listening—such as summing up a composition by the mental note: ‘oh, yes, this is the one that has the squeaky-sounding tenor near the beginning.’ The purpose of such ‘highlighting’ is to recognize the composition for an eventual examination. While it might work well enough, it’s missing the ultimate point of the listening—which is the growth that careful, absorbed listening allows.

The Tao of Listening has no need for highlighting, outlining, or summarizing. It encompasses the whole.

4.      Put aside the idea of finishing

Just about all of us have a strong habit of mind that views individual activities as having a definite ending point. Once we have reached the ‘goal’ of that ending point, we stop. That’s especially true in dealing with assigned materials such as textbook readings: we read them because we want to have a better grade, not really because we’re interested in what they might have to say. So we read and once we think we’ve ‘got it’, we’re finished.

However, listening can be much more engaging. There really is no end to the Tao of Listening. The composition comes to an end but then we can listen to it again—listen at another time, immediately, whenever we want. There comes a point at which we can be sure that we recognize the composition when we hear it, but that is only the beginning, and not the ending. The value of remaining open-ended regarding listening cannot be overstressed.

I can speak here from my own experience. How many times in my life have I taught the Mozart G-Minor Symphony? How many recordings and performances have I heard of it? How many times have I gone over the score analytically? How many times have I played through parts of it (or all of it) on the piano, either from score or playing it as a piano duet with a partner? And yet after all these times, it never grows dull, never grows stale, and I always find something new and interesting in it on every single encounter. I will never ‘finish’ the Mozart G-Minor Symphony, just as I will never ‘finish’ any musical composition that I have come to experience.

5.      Listen to only a small amount at each sitting

This one is especially tricky given the constraints of college life. We have a tendency to be gluttons about our assigned work. We gobble up books or reading assignments, which gives us a kind of indigestion of the mind.

Gobbled listening produces the same kind of indigestion, really an ear-and-mind fatigue in which the dulled mind hears little, understands less, and enjoys not at all. We must accept that there is only so much we can absorb in a single sitting.

For that reason, I strongly recommend that you break your listening times into small periods, but have a number of them daily if at all possible. Allow yourself to absorb what you have heard, to freshen your mind and ear, before continuing. Many students study and carry out their assignments in a state of tension. Just about every bodyworker knows the phenomenon called “student shoulders” in which the shoulder and neck muscles have become like rocks, as they continue to stiffen under the pressure of all that mental tension.

Listening to small amounts at a time relaxes the mind and body rather than tensing it. There is no sense of being overwhelmed by the amount of music to hear or comprehend. Thus the listening becomes more of a pleasure (a time to undo the tensions and stress of study) rather than something to be avoided until the night before the exam.

6.      Listen as you would listen to a favorite song or piece of music

It is not difficult or demanding for any of us to sit down and listen to a piece of music that we really like, just as we don’t feel particularly resistant about reading a poem or a novel that we really enjoy.

Yet, when the materials are assigned, we tend to treat them differently. This becomes something that we have to do rather than what we do for pleasure. But if we can begin to develop a mind towards the assigned listening that incorporates a sense of openness, of invitation, we can begin to move past these arbitrary mental barriers. Let’s remember that our own biases—of what we ‘like’ and what we ‘don’t like’—are mutable, flexible, and ultimately quite able to be changed and influenced. We are never as stuck in our own ways as we like to think that we are.

7.      Treat the composition as you would treat an honored guest

It isn’t uncommon to think of textbooks as some kind of enemy territory, which must be slogged through no matter what, whether we want to go through this territory or not. We acquire a pugnacious attitude towards them, seeking to find problems with them, errors in them, point out what we don’t like or don’t agree with. It’s really very competitive and quite exhausting.

But we treat well-liked books very differently: we often honor them, treat them well, gently.

I would suggest that the compositions you hear can be treated with this kind of gentleness and openness. One way to help to start doing this is to treat the physical recordings themselves with care; put them in a nice place, handle them gently, and so forth. It sounds a little silly, but in fact it can have an effect on your mindset in approaching the listening assignments.

8.      Treat the composition as you would treat a longterm friend

When we have longterm friends, we accept over time that we may not like everything about that person, or agree with everything that person says, or approve of everything that person does. To expect any person in our lives to fit our own biases and preconceptions perfectly is to invite problems. Deep and abiding friendships are one of the most useful arenas for learning about ourselves and our relationships with others.

It is absolutely unreasonable and fundamentally impossible that you will like every piece of music that you hear, that you will respond to each composition in the same way, that you will experience a strong kinship or bonding with every composition. It will not happen—and that’s is the way it is, and should be, and not an indication of anything being wrong.

When dealing with a person, if you give it a try you can almost invariably find something about that person you can agree with, or that you like; you can do the same with pieces of music. Treat them as old friends that are sometimes frustrating or exasperating, and at other times wonderful and supportive.

9.      Approach the composition with humility

Approaching a musical composition with humility means to remember that what I do know and what I do understand is very limited. What it is possible to know is very great. The principle is that if I come across a composition, or a passage in a composition, that I do not understand, I do not blame the composer or the performance. Instead, I choose to examine myself.

10.  Approach the composition with gratitude

Until very recently the opportunity to listen to performances of music were rare. Before the advent of recordings, one might get a chance to hear an orchestra play a particular Mozart symphony fewer than a half-dozen times in one’s lifetime. The chance to hear a really fine orchestra play that Mozart symphony might happen once, if at all.

For most people, there weren’t too many opportunities to hear performances. People would play through the printed scores themselves on the piano or harpsichord as much as they could, but that was a limited experience for most people.

And even that luxury is relatively recent. Music printing posed many special challenges and obstacles above printing text; as a result, printed music has been readily available for only the past few centuries. Even then, given that copyright laws were lax or nonexistent in most countries, composers were often reluctant to have their compositions printed due of fears of piracy. That attitude persisted well into the early 19th century. It’s quite sobering to realize that J.S. Bach saw only a handful of his compositions in print during his own lifetime—and those few that were printed were at his own instigation and expense. Until the 19th century, most notated music was circulated in handwritten copies.

And yet here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century, able to tote around compact discs and their players, listen to more or less the sum total of the music of human civilization as we wish. It would have beyond the wildest dreams of a 19th century musician to be able to hear a great orchestra, say the Berlin Philharmonic, perform all of the Mozart symphonies. And yet any of us can do that by a quick visit to our local Tower Records and the expenditure of a few dollars.

This is, to put it mildly, a miracle. It is a gift, a bounty beyond all imagination. And yet we have come to take it for granted—perhaps that’s natural under the circumstances, but it remains miraculous all the same.

Take a moment to think of all the people who have worked and labored to make that miracle happen—from the composer’s teachers and mentors, to the composer, to the printers, to the publishers, to the engravers, to the performers, to the record companies, to the inventors of recording, to the inventors of music printing, to the inventors of digital recording, to the inventors of laser technologies, to the inventors of compact discs, and so forth and so on. Start putting them altogether and there is a vast assembly of people involved in bringing that shiny CD to you—so vast, in fact, that it’s altogether possible that every single person you meet during the course of a day has either had something to do with it or is related to someone who has had something to do with it, however distantly. (Don’t forget about the secretaries at the insurance companies who make out claim checks for the company that makes the paper for the jewel-box liner; the fellow the drove the truck that delivered the wood to make the paper; the company that makes the glass for the lens on the laser; the people who wrote the user manual for your CD player, and their doctors and dentists—and so on.)

Finally: just the plain simple gratitude to the composer, for having created a particular composition. There was a human being behind each and every musical composition. (There is a special section for that later on, but I bring it up now as well.)

11.  Listen without judgment

It is typical of our postmodern ethos that we read with our relativistic minds firmly in place, filtering everything through the lens of our own biases and experiences. While this has its value in reading—although frequently it is overstressed—it has little if any value in musical listening.

When we truly listen we are not primed for comment, for interjection, for judgment. We have all had the experience of conversing with someone who does not really listen to us; they are simply waiting for the next opportunity to speak. They may even be annoyed with us for taking so long to say what we want to say because they already know what they are going to say next. This isn’t really listening.

True listening is spacious, patient, accomodating. It is a kind of receptivity. The process resembles listening to someone we have respect for. So in listening, it’s really best to stay open to the music on its own merits. If I come across passages I don’t like or don’t comprehend, I can mentally put them aside without comment or judgment. I may return to these passages later and discover that they have meaning for me after all. Or I may eventually decide that the composition does not resonate with me in any significant way.

But that does not render it valueless. A musical composition is a process, and not a static state. In many compositions there may be only some sections or passages which really strike me or intrigue me; the rest of it may not interest me very much. But in time, other sections may come to be more interesting. There’s really no way of knowing.

12.  Put aside concerns over time, place, or style

Much of the music we hear in Introduction to Music is the product of cultures vastly different from our own, separated by time and geography. The compositions may be written within an entirely different cultural ethos than our own—including those compositions from the Western heritage.

As a result we may find ourselves mentally comparing the music of that culture to the music of our own culture, or micro-culture, and finding it lacking in some quality or characteristic that we value in our own culture. This can only diminish our capacity, in that we literally close down our open mind in the process.

In a sense, negative aesthetic consideration is a kind of distraction. To give one example that might prove helpful, consider attending a formal ceremony of cultural or spiritual significance—say, a funeral. The purpose of the funeral is to place one’s self into a situation of recognizing the life of the individual who has died, and in many traditions, to understand and perceive the transcendent nature of existence itself. If one becomes concerned with the minutiae of the ceremony—such as, say, one doesn’t like the color of the priest’s robes or the flower arrangement or where one is sitting in the church, then this all constitutes a kind of distraction. The meaning of the ceremony is lost, or at least severely diminished, by these distractions.

This applies to the Tao of Listening. Try to avoid becoming distracted about the composer’s hairstyle, so to speak. As much as possible, try to hear the music on its own terms, with as little mental comparison as possible. We fully recognize that some such comparison and judging is unavoidable, but the Tao of Listening is such that we recognize these distractions for what they are, and treat them as sideshows, not the main event.

I would like to stress here that I am not referring to knowledgeable discernment in regards to the music—i.e., that we recognize a Viennese Classical idiom in hearing Mozart, or recognize an instrumental touch, or a formal pattern, or anything of that sort. What I refer to here specifically is perhaps best described by the term kvetching.

13.  The Tao of Listening resembles panning for gold

In any set of listening assignments there are sure to be individual works or sections of works which we don’t find particularly interesting. Instead of getting upset about this, the best way to deal with it is to understand that gold dust as well as gold nuggets lie within the set of assigned pieces, or within a particular composition. We don’t really know at first where those nuggets will appear. So we stay patient, and allow the panning process to continue: if we’re impatient, we run a real risk of missing some of the gold dust, or even worse, dumping out some larger nuggets of gold.

14.  The Tao of Listening resembles cultivating a garden

The Tao of Listening is a path of cultivation. It is a gradual path, a step by step approach. In this it very much resembles the cultivation of a garden, in which the process is slow, gradual, but also quite steady within its slow tempo.

Repetition is a very good thing in the Tao of Listening, just as it is in the cultivation of a fine garden. We listen to pieces again and again, each time opening as much as we can to the possibilities of discovery. Unlike reading an assigned textbook passage, there is really no fundamental difference between listening to a musical composition for the first time or for the fiftieth time: each encounter builds upon the last, to be sure, but each encounter is complete and whole in and of itself.

15.  The Tao of Listening resembles meeting with friends

Building on the garden-cultivating metaphor, we can treat listening to musical compositions as if we were meeting with our friends. We do not say to ourselves: I’ve met with this friend four times, and so I now have everything I need from that person and there is no need to ever see this friend again. (At least I hope we don’t say that!) We don’t keep track of our encounters with our friends by means of a tally or a scorecard. The Tao of Listening does not require a tally or a scorecard either.

16.  The Tao of Listening resembles eating a nutritious meal

There is a wonderful Shakespeare line: “If music be the food of love, play on.” This line can be expanded to understand that there is an encountering of music that is nourishment for the spirit.

Food is a kind of energy. When we eat we are processing and transforming energy which we have received from other people. A meal can be healthy or harmful: not only what we eat (healthy foods versus junk foods, balance of food groups, being careful about stuff like refined sugars and preservatives, all that), but in how we go about eating it. Eating very quickly, bolting and/or gulping, is often a sure path to indigestion.

Music is also a kind of energy which we are processing and transforming as we listen. Thus we need to be aware of the value of the music we listen to—i.e., there is music which may very well upset the balance of our natural harmony, what the Taoists call the ‘chi’, or the mind/body energy. There is also a way of listening to music—hurried, upset, filled with judgment or resentment—which also upsets that harmonic balance.

This is not the place for me to be making arbitrary pronouncements about the ultimate value of one kind of music over another. I will say, however, that music which has been found to stand the test of time—such as the works of the great masters of all traditions—has done so in general due to its being found to be ‘nourishing’ (to continue the metaphor) in fundamental and discernible ways.

17.  The Tao of Listening resembles receiving a gift from a kind friend

Consider what went into the creation of any composition you hear. (I covered quite a bit of that in the above section on listening with gratitude.) While this is in some ways a repetition of that section, it carries a more personal connotation.

The composition of a piece of music can be tremendously demanding and time-consuming, even for the greatest of master composers. Beethoven endured agonies during the creative process, so much so that he seemed nearly insane to his associates. Other composers would allow a work to germinate slowly, steadily in their minds (Mozart, Brahms) until the time came to write it out. For many composers, any individual work may have been literally years in the making. Just the act of notating a piece of music alone is quite a job—try copying out, say, a Haydn symphony in full orchestral score some day.

In addition to this, consider the vast training that has gone into a composer’s education. The creation of a work of art is one of the most demanding activities a human being is capable of doing. Any person who has ever attempted—successfully or not—to carry through a creative process from beginning to end is sure to gain a new appreciation of the process.

This person who went through all of this did so for many reasons, but the sense of a giving a gift to posterity does in fact figure into the thought processes of many creative artists. You are the recipient of that gift—it’s like a wonderful birthday gift, given to you in recognition of your having been born into this world.

18.  This kind of listening resembles observing a full moon rising

In certain periods during Chinese and Japanese history, there developed a custom called “moon viewing.” On a full moon night people would assemble in some charming spot, either a garden, or perhaps farther out in the country, and spend the evening viewing the moon. There would be tea and wine, and probably poetry. Good conversation, of course, and always the moon.

To observe a full moon rising I must have patience. In an era when a sound byte lasts about 8 seconds, the cultivation of this kind of patience may seem strange. But most valuable things require some patience. Learning to play a musical instrument requires patience and persistence. Learning how to sew requires patience and persistence, etc.

In terms of the Tao of Listening, this means not demanding immediate and complete comprehension on the first hearing. This, of course, tends to contrast with many kinds of assumptions in our society about what it means to be “smart” or even a “good student”. Too often we confuse “smart” with “quick study”. The quick study may be, in fact, winning many battles but losing the war.

The full moon does not appear in the sky in an instant; it rises slowly over the horizon. Similarly, musical appreciation and comprehension does not just appear in a blink; it slowly blossoms in the heart/mind.

19.  This kind of listening resembles learning a new language

When first attempting to learn a new language as an adult, we fall into the habits of our native language. This happens because we have built up very strong expectations in the mind that verbal formulations will continue to follow the patterns we already know. For this reason it takes a long time to learn and acquire new patterns of linguistic meaning.

Similarly, in listening to music we may expect the music to follow patterns we already know. However, given that music is the product of many different times and cultures, it is quite possible that the overall language of the music will be markedly different from our expectations. So in our listening, we must be aware that the musical language of a particular culture may not be familiar to our ears at first, but will require some time and patience to acquire.

20.  This kind of listening resembles visiting a new country

This metaphor is quite similar to preceding one about learning a new language. When visiting a foreign country it often happens that we make mistakes in etiquette and offend people unintentionally. This happens because we have developed strong expectations about how people normally behave, based on our own upbringing and culture. When placed in a situation where people do not have these expectations, but instead have other quite different expectations, it can feel quite confusing.

The ‘expectation’ of listening may differ from culture to culture. For example, we do not listen to Gregorian plainchant with the purpose of being entertained, or even emotionally stirred. If we listen with this expectation, we are sure to be disappointed—the music may well wind up ‘offending’ us, due primarily to a difference in culture and not any shortcoming in either the music or ourselves.

21.  This kind of listening resembles slowly baking bread

This is another metaphor for patience. When baking bread I have to use the right temperature. Too hot and I end up with burned dough. Too cool and the bread doesn’t rise.

Similarly, in the Tao of Listening, trying to absorb too many notes I simply clog my brain with undigested sounds. Listening too little and my understanding begins to wither.

22.  Practice listening regularly

Regular listening practice is the key. Short segments of listening are easily worked into a day if you apply some creative attention to the process.

A portable CD player of the “Discman” variety is a tremendous boon to the average college student. They aren’t very expensive, are rugged, and can provide valuable flexibility for your listening practice.

Consider transportation: many people cannot read while sitting on a bus due to motion sickness, or while in a car (provided they aren’t driving, of course). But most of us can listen to music. So during bus rides—even short ones—or car rides, or BART trips, or whatever—you can work in some listening.

Mealtimes: you can listen a bit while having lunch.

Walking: a daily walk is a smart thing to do. Fortunately life on a large college campus tends to enforce plenty of walking. You can use those walking periods for a little listening practice.

Break times: a university campus provides an almost ideal situation for listening practice. You can sit under a tree, or on a bench, quietly, and listen with full attention. It need not be thought of as study, or preparation, or homework, but just as a fine, relaxing thing to do.

Whatever ways you choose to come up with working listening into your schedule, be creative about it, and remember that listening is one kind of ‘study’ you can do when other forms of study aren’t available or advisable.

23.  Practice listening daily

Anything worth cultivating takes very regular practice. There is an oft-quoted story in which a famous pianist responds to an interviewer’s question about daily practice. The pianist says: if I miss one day, I know it; if I miss two days, my friends know it; if I miss three days, EVERYBODY knows it.

No matter how you work your listening practice into your life, be sure to listen on a daily basis. Do not skip a day if you can at all avoid it.

Another recommendation I make is that there be one period during the day which is devoted specifically to listening. I would go further and recommend that this be the same approximate time of each day—perhaps after breakfast, or before dinner, or after lunch, or when you are finished with the day’s classes, or whatever seems to work for you. Make a bit of a ritual about it: set up the player, get yourself settled, think through what you might want to listen for (if anything), perhaps read the section in the textbook regarding the work in question. Then listen with full, 100% attention—but relaxed and fully in touch with the Tao of Listening. When you’ve finished listening, remove the CD from the player and store it properly, close the textbook. Make a few notes about the listening if you wish. You might wind up with a few questions—jot them down and be prepared to bring them up during our discussion sections.

24.  Use the sangha of the Tao of Listening

A sangha is a group of like-minded people. The Sanskrit word itself comes from the Buddhist tradition; it refers specifically to the 2600-year-old worldwide monastic community, but in a broader sense it encompasses any group of practitioners. It’s a wonderful word and can be expanded further to refer to any group of people who are practicing any process together.

The sangha of the Tao of Listening is your discussion section: people are listening to what you’re listening to, they may have reactions to the music or questions about it. The feedback and discussion that can arise during such sessions is invaluable, both for its informative content and also for the basic support it provides. Be sure to use it to the fullest: that’s what it is there for.