Musical Listening

What if we listened to each other and the world around us with the same care and attention we bring to music? What if this listening practice is key to human flourishing? Julian Johnson draws on a remarkable convergence of research from multiple disciplines to argue that musical listening offers a counterweight to the self-enclosed nature of modern life. He explores aesthetic experience as a practice of opening to the world, one that reconfigures our habitual, everyday sense of self and undoes the closed subjectivity which underpins so many problems of modernity.

Part I, Musical Listening, considers how listening has been theorized, from empirical approaches in sociology and psychology to philosophical explanations. Questioning the dominant idea of music listening as a form of consumption, it sets out an alternative account of listening as an enactive mode of embodied engagement, determined neither wholly by the object nor the subject. Far from being a merely theoretical matter, this listening practice has profound social and political consequences.

Part 2, Musical Thinking, explores the idea that listening holds the key to some of the most pressing problems of modern thought and life. This idea hinges on the way in which the sensuous particularity of aesthetic attention challenges the dominance of our habitual linguistic discourses. To this end, it revisits the relation of music and language, asking what is lost when language is shorn of its musical qualities and what is gained when we value art as an alternative way of knowing the world.

Part 3, Musical Being, develops the real-world ramifications of musical listening and aesthetic attentiveness. It considers listening as a mode of knowing the world and thus as a way of being in the world. Johnson explores how such a lived practice challenges our ideas of education, promotes greater wellbeing, and shapes a more empathic and ethical comportment. Touching on ideas of wonder and enchantment, he finds common ground with notions of posthumanism and the overcoming of the human exceptionalism that lies at the heart of our contemporary ecological crisis.