“Hungry Listening”, Roy Hart and vocal ecotism

 

 

 

 

In the framework of my research for the project vocal ecotism – vocal art in a wounded world I came across a book whose title stimulated my appetite for getting to know more on what it is about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book “Hungry Listening” (Minneapolis 2020) is written by Dylan Robinson, a musicologist from Canada with an Indigenous background. It is absolutely worth to read for everyone who is willing to open her/his horizon on what it means to listen. (Some experience in reading academic stuff might be helpful, though.) The main issue of the book is to analyze encounters of Western music with Indigenous “music” and it shows with impressive clarity how easily “settler´s” logic and Western ideas of how music seems to function dominate those events.

 

 

 

In the first chapter Robinson compares in a general way the different ideas of music in Indigenous and Western thinking. He also shows how “our” Western history has shaped our way of listening – a listening that seems very often a version of greed - and that there are alternative ways which we still find in Indigenous traditions.

 

 

 

In this short review I want to begin with some aspects of the book that seems to have some similarities with the approach in the tradition of Wolfsohn/Hart. This part of the text was originally addressed to people who work in the tradition of Wolfsohn/Hart but I guess it will be of some interest to everyone in the vocal ecotism realm.

 

 

Then I will mention a couple of ideas which are more directly relevant for our discussion of a vocal ecotism.

 

 

 

 

 

Listening and Voice

 

 

 

A lot of what Robinson presents as forms of listening which are different from the “settler´s” ways, reminds me on what “we” in the RH-tradition practice in our ways of listening to other voices.

 

 

 

Robinson claims that “hungry listening prioritizes the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch, and texture of sound” (p.38). A listening that doesn´t want to be hungry is more about creating relationship through listening to each other and to allow ourselves to be affected on all the different levels of our existence.

 

 

 

I think this is more or less what we try to do in an individual voice lesson.

 

 

 

Robinson puts it also in this way: “Resisting forms of hungry listening also entails dislocating the fixity and goal-orientated teleology of listening with more flexible listening practices that (…) situate listening as a relational action that occurs not merely between listener and listened-to, but between the layers of our individual positionalities” (p.58).

 

 

 

Who are you? When you sing and when you listen??

 

 

 

In Indigenous context singing and listening has a lot to do with history, with remembering, with relating. But in a way very different from the typical Western way history is understood. The Indigenous history is partly contained in songs and these songs allow to relate to the stories and to the lands that are subject of these songs. This form of relating includes feelings, moods etc. In the Indigenous group where Robinson comes from, they say it is important to listen with “three ears: two on the sides of our head and the one that is in our heart” (p. 51) Listening in this way becomes a form of “feeling the history”.

 

 

 

For me this rings a couple of bells related to what we do in our work in the tradition of Wolfsohn/Hart. We practice this form of listening and so we are sometimes able to hear the stories in the voices without hearing any words. And we are able to hear the story of the voice itself, the different layers which have been created through life and experiences. With the historic layers of my own listening I can relate to the layers of the sounds done by the voice that I hear.

 

 

 

Robinson talks about as listening “as a form of feeling the history from heart and ears together”.

 

 

 

In another part of the book Robinson talks about an art installation that had been part of an exhibition at a Museum of Anthropology in Canada. The installation was called “gathered together” and showed more or less a kitchen table with a couple of chairs around, a table cloth, a tea pot and some cups. This installation emphasizes on the importance of gathering in Indigenous traditions. It is understood not just as a gathering of individuals but also a “bringing together components of a history” (p.71). The way the people of such a gathering listen to each other is not “hungry”, not just aiming to collect content that is heard.

 

 

 

“When one person was speaking, the rest of the group listened respectfully (…). When the next person shared their thoughts with the group, they would respond in-depth, speaking not only to their own experiences and perspectives, but also to those they just heard.” They listened to each other retaining what they had heard and “incorporating it into how they perceived the topic at hand” (p.70).

 

 

 

To me this sounds like the description of the ideal “River”,  which was the name for the group meetings of the Roy Hart Theatre

 

 

 

In Indigenous traditions the senses are not strictly separated but understood as one system of relating to the world. I feel reminded to what AWE said - that for him eyes and ears are one sense and that singing always is a form of touching.

 

 

 

Why do I think it is worth to notice and contemplate these (possible) parallels between listening in North American Indigenous people and our approach that is very much embedded in a European and Western tradition?

 

 

 

One reason for me is that these similarities indicate something that I always found intriguing in our work. It has a transcultural quality. Although it is grown out of a very special European situation it aims to transcend this tradition and become a work that is able to use the words “human” and “voice” in a pretty universal sense.

 

 

 

The second point is not less important: the book “Hungry Listening” is a strong contribution to a worldwide discussion in which we have to realize that the Western way of relating to each other and to the non-human world shows its destructive consequences and that we need to find better ways. Some of them might be found in older traditions around the world. From a perspective inside this discussion, it seems obvious that we from the Wolfsohn/Hart tradition have to say something about these issues. We explored already ways of listening and singing that go beyond the forms that are still dominant in the Western and westernized world. In other words: It is possible that our work is relevant even beyond personal exploration, development, and liberation.

 

 

 

We are able to join a movement that sees “listening as activism”, an expression that comes from Pauline Oliveros and her concept of Deep Listening. (see p.248).

 

 

 

But it should not be concealed that Robinson mentions more than once that we live in a moment of history in which we need to confess that we don´t know what listening really is. All of us, Indigenous and Westerners/”settlers” have lost save ground where all these things seem obvious. For finding out what listening means to us today we cannot only refer to earlier traditions, Indigenous or Wolfsohn/Hart or whatever, but we need to find the courage to ask the question again. What does it mean to listen to myself, to others and to everything and every being in the world?

 

 

 

I guess it is the artists who will start the search for new forms of listening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Listening and vocal ecotism

 

 

 

In Robinson´s book the ecological issues appear only as a side issue. He is more interested in questions of the encounter of different forms of music and how to understand und to practice music and listening. But the way in which singing in Indigenous traditions can be seen as an integral part of a life form that includes a respectful attitude to the non-human world is of course very interesting for us and our search for a more respectful approach to the world and everthing in it.

 

 

 

Reading the book has increased my doubts, if the traditional Western forms of making vocal art (in a concert, a theatre piece, on stage etc.) will be the right choice for a vocal art in the wounded world. Robinson emphasizes very much on the fact, that in his Indigenous tradition music is not just an aesthetic material or an aesthetic event but more a “cultural practice that has more than aesthetic significance” (p.131).

 

 

 

As a cultural practice singing and music is understood as a form of archiving history, a form of law, and a way to address the non-human world that surrounds us. I don´t want to deny the exceptional and wonderful creative explosion that was possible because music in Europe could be liberated from all sorts of duties and opened the field to all forms and possibilities that the idea of music contains. Nobody wants to give up this special world. But maybe it is time to also return to this other form of “singing” that is integrated in the very life forms in which we exist. We don´t know yet what that will mean. Vocal ecotism is one attempt to find new forms of singing as a cultural and more than aesthetic practice. And as far as I can see the search will be more promising in the field of performance art than in music itself.

 

 

 

 

 

In performance art we are already used to ask where our art will be presented because a lot what performance artists do is not made for a normal stage or a theatre. Robinson asks this question for music. He asserts that the classical places for music demand a certain way of listening – the hungry form – rather than the forms that we are looking for. “What happens when we change these sites of listening to include intimate spaces of one-on-one listening, spaces in relation with the land, spaces where the audience members are not bound by the particular kinds of attention these spaces assert?” (p.61) This is a question for vocal ecotism, too. If we look for vocal actions which are cultural practices rather than mere aesthetic events, we will have to find the right places for this.

 

 

 

Robinson talks about a form of listening that he calls “guest listening, which treats the act of listening as entering into a sound territory” (p.53). This is an expression that I like very much. Different to the more or less artificial situation of a concert where they try to eliminate all disturbing sounds, we prefer to finds sound territories that create already a situation in which we with our voices can enter. Without just using the given sounds for our art, but starting a dialogue with what we find and keeping a respectful attitude to all sounds present. This is at least one possible way to start an exploration.