This is a video (no words) that I used as an introduction
to my lecture under the same title, at “DIAMERISMA 5” (Thessaloniki, Greece, January 2018).
The central idea was not on technical issues. Rather, I focused on how can we become active listeners to music, in the sense of consciously deciding to “open” towards its vast richness.
To do so, my idea is that we have to abandon just a little our habitual stance:
“I am a person who likes this kind of music and not that”.
We have to move a little further from the fashion, from our habits to remain passive to stimuli and using only the criterion of “I like / I do not like”.
In love, we have to approach the Other in order to get to know him or her, we have to be open to the refreshing “new”.
Similarly, since we decide to engage in the contact processes with music and get to enjoy its infinite gifts, we have to open to the new, to the unknown – even to some kind of sounds we thought that we would never like.
Who knows?
Maybe what we considered cacophony till now, may open a new vast horizon of beautiful audio landscapes, if we only become actively willing to open to the new sound palettes.
I do not at all mean to clean our ears
or to meditate before listening to music or to study music or to buy expensive equipment.
I mean just to pay some attention to what we are listening, to devise creatively our own ways to discover its countless aspects, which might prove to be a new treasure for us.
And, n this lecture, I shall attempt to suggest the way of thinking in order to do so, to devise our personal ways as pathways to our possible encounter with music.
Finally, I would say that this lecture is about music, of course, but it is also about the broader issue of being active in life by opening to the new.