Listen – On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber is a meditation on what it is we talk about when we talk about listening to music:
This is a book about music, and about the people who listen to it – your friends, your neighbours, me and you.
Source: Listen by Michel Faber
It is made up of a number of sections, each containing a bricolage of reviews, online comments, interviews and Faber’s own experiences, to address a particular idea. These sections often read as much as self-contained essays, but as a whole, they bleed into each other to create an intriguing exploration.[1] Although the book is not intended to be Faber’s reflection on music, his style of writing cannot help being personal. This feels something akin to what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’, where layers of meaning and context are meticulously woven into the narrative.
As a book, Listen explores a number of questions. For example, what is it that we are actually hearing? How does this differ to what animals hear? What is the actual place and purpose of music? For adults? For children? Emotionally? As an accessory? As a commodity? Does listening to and engaging with music actually make children smarter? What are the stories we tell and are told through music? Who tells these stories and why is so much music in English? When is music just noise? Is Nickleback’s music really that bad? Is it still ok to listen to Morrissey? We are going to listen to Taylor Swift forever, right? How does music play out in the brain? What does it mean to be a fan? What is the place of music reviews? Is classical music just a fancy orchestral cover band? What is the place of music in space? What are the appropriate precautions to take when listening? Vinyl is better, right? Can everyone really sing? Or is it okay to fake it with a backing track? However, more often than not, these questions are left ambiguously unanswered with the reader simply left to dwell on things. Almost like a warning, Faber states in the beginning that he is here to “change your mind about your mind”.[2]
By its meandering nature, Listen is one of those books that sows many seeds. Some of the tidbits that took are that: “the world is intrinsically silent.”[3] “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do.”[4] “The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise.”[5] Classical music is “a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.”[6] “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get.”[7] “The only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.”[8] “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more.”[9]
Just as a black hole is defined by what is not there, but should be, Faber’s taste and preferences are glimpsed at or inferred throughout. There are times when I am really drawn into Faber’s discussion of his love of Coil’s Astral Disaster, his father’s collection of schlager or Jane Tabor’s ‘A Proper Sort of Gardener’. However, these threads are a distraction from what this book is really about and that is ‘you’ as the reader. As he states in the introduction:
Art does not ‘hold a mirror up to nature’. It holds a mirror up to you.
Source: Listen by Michel Faber
This made me wonder if Listen was actually written in the margins of another abandoned book?
In a discussion of the track ‘Luminous Beings’ on the Song Exploder podcast, Jon Hopkins spoke about his process of creating something in order to destroy it:
Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.
Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)
I wondered about this idea while reading Michel Faber’s book Listen and the autobiographical material.
In the introduction, Faber explains that this book is one that he always wanted to write. However, while reading it I was left wondering exactly what the initial idea for the book was? Faber states that the purpose of the book is to ‘perceive your stuff differently’.[10] However, like Hopkins’ initial idea, I wondered if there was an initial autobiographical ode to music which the book actually deconstructs, a reflection similar to say Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, that was destroyed to write this story.
Listen covers so much territory. The catch is that it often demands of the reader to stop and consider.[11] I just wonder how many readers would actually dedicate the time to properly engage with it? Interestingly, in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Faber explains that the original script was much longer.[12]
All in all, I am glad I stumbled upon Listen on shelf of my local library, while randomly perusing while my daughter was looking for books. It is definitely a book that I feel has changed my mind about music and listening and helped appreciate the small things.
- “The author, writing with refreshing openness and stylishness, proceeds exactly down that path, tackling all manner of listening-related subjects, from volume to genre to atonality to classical music to white bias. The book is a heady brew of energetic essays, each one enjoyable, although it can be difficult to discern a throughline of thought or even, sometimes, the relevance of a given essay to the book’s expressed central aims.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber [6/10] – Read Listen Watch by Andres Kabel ↩
- “Reading this book will change the way you listen. I’m not here to change your mind about Dusty Springfield or Shostakovich or Tupac Shakur or synthpop. I’m here to change your mind about your mind.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “The world is intrinsically silent. When trees fall or bombs explode or violinists pluck pizzicato, all that happens is that the surrounding air is disturbed in various ways. Atmosphere is displaced. This displaced atmosphere is what enters our ears, and we do the rest. Our ears and brains are musical instruments. To be precise: our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing. The world is playing us.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “Being grown-up doesn’t guarantee that you understand anything; you merely have the vocabulary to talk as if you do. An adult is capable of phrases like ‘sinister, stalking guitar riff’, which sounds cleverer and more definitive than ‘Argh! Vampires!’ But is it? Whenever we find ourselves feeling superior to a child who is expressing their naïve opinion of what music is about, we should ask ourselves: What is it about my own response that’s so much better than this child’s?” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “The symbolic resonance is clear: avant-garde art will swamp us if given half a chance. Parochial art which harks back to a bygone era is a bastion against the dangerous incomers. The familiar sounds of which our tribe approves are Music. What’s not Music is Noise. We don’t want any of those noisy harbingers coming over here, stealing our time and violating our brain cells.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “Rather than feeling like a tribute band, it almost feels like a séance to me. I mean, Beethoven couldn’t have played a string quartet, so it’s not as if he was able to make it exist; he didn’t do it. You’re enabling his concept to come to life. So I always think of it more as a séance – tuning into that man and his humanity.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “When a vinyl disc is brand new, the first play is the best you’ll ever get. Almost inevitably, there will already be some unwanted pops, clicks and rustles, because molten polyvinyl chloride is prone to manufacturing defects – rogue bubbles, irregularities in the heating and cooling phases, or impurities in the vinyl itself. Each additional play will degrade the surface a little more.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “I also respect that some people enjoy the sound of vinyl more than they enjoy the sound of digital. Music happens in the brain, not in some abstract realm of graphs and meters. If the ‘warmth’ of vinyl’s groove rumble makes you deeply happy, you are more blessed than a CD nerd who is deeply dissatisfied by the kilohertz parameters of the 1995 German remaster compared to the 2003 Japan-only remaster that he can’t get hold of but has read about in a hi-fi magazine. … keep in mind: the only medium that’s ‘full frequency’ is your head.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “If you’re middle-aged, you will soon reach a point where your brain can’t process much more. Having once felt well-informed and connected, you will feel yourself growing increasingly ignorant and out-of-touch. More and more of the new music you wish to understand will be made by, and for, minds that don’t work like yours. Music which speaks to formative experiences that didn’t form you, music which riffs on cultural allusions that elude you, music which has no use for all the things you’re an expert on. The future is here and you’re not part of it.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- “Many books about music are a glorified display of the stuff the author owns, which he (it usually is a he) thinks you should own too.† It’s not the aim of this book to make you own more stuff. The aim is to help you perceive your stuff differently.” Source: Listen by Michel Faber ↩
- Personally, I had to read it twice to really take it all in. Even then, I feel I could easily have gone back and read it all over again. ↩
- It would seem that Faber listened to his editors and trimmed it back. Although I wonder if there is a means of publishing these pieces left on the chopping board elsewhere, in a blog or something, similar to Andrew Stafford’s ‘Notes from Pig City’? Or maybe I just need to read it a third time. ↩
REVIEW: Listen – On Music, Sound & Us (Michel Faber) by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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