holistic hearing

One of my students is working on “Fragile Forest” by Phil Keaggy. Now I enjoy and respect Keaggy and his music, but I probably am aware of more guitarists than the average person, and therefore, am aware of a lot more music, talent, etc. All that is to say, he occupies a proper place in my respected guitarist list and I enjoy his music for what it is. Now all that is to set up my next remarks so that maybe you can see how meaningful they might be in this context.
Fragile Forest is Keaggy’s finest creative moment. There is a phrase in the piece that is one of my favorite phrases from any composer in any style for any instrument. It is one measure long, and sandwiched so perfectly into the context, that I’m not sure it could survive apart from the piece. Keaggy is a very programmatic, imagistic player, but most of his works simply “fit” the image he is dreaming. This one actually paints the image. One actually takes a deep woods walk and experiences all the activity of the forest, full frontal and peripheral, obvious and subtle.
Now that I’ve so completely exposed my goofy response to this piece, I have to admit, that maybe it isn’t as wonderful if it is only in your ears as it is when it is in your hands and your ears. Perhaps that explains why I think I can play it better than he can. Perhaps that is why most of us players, once we’ve played a piece, always think we play it better than someone else. It is not that we think we are better players, but we enjoy hearing ourselves play because we also hear with our fingertips. We feel the music being made. To a degree, this could also explain a phenomenon that has always been explained in a different way. Maybe it is why we don’t enjoy listening to recordings of ourselves. Playback affects only our ears. Our fingertips only remember, they don’t feel in the same way. When one plays, he also feels the guitar responding against his chest and legs – different pitches vibrate more strongly in different parts of the instrument, thereby causing the player to experience a constantly shifting physical response to the music in addition to what his ears are hearing.
Perhaps it takes more than a single sense to experience the truly magnificent things in life. Of course when all the senses store their information about an experience, any of the other senses can access that information when the rest are absent. A photograph of a picturesque scene from last summer’s vacation, though only visual, will call up smell, sounds, a breeze, etc. Your friends will only see the photograph. Though my wife is beautiful, unless I’d held her face in my hands and felt the curve of her lips with my fingertips, a photograph could not tell the whole story. But even with all that stored, accessed knowledge and memory, it makes the one sense rudely inadequate.
So I’m able to listen to Keaggy play his phrase and actually feel it on my fingertips. I’m not talking about the feeling of fingerboard and frets and strings. I’m talking about the feeling of music. I’m talking about the feeling of a musical phrase. Just as I can enjoy hearing Keaggy play his phrase, I could enjoy playing it with earplugs inserted. One sense accesses the beauty that was stored by the others. Simply having heard it would not do it justice.
Most of us listen or don’t listen to music simply with our ears, or as with much pop music, only with our bodies. But in our everyday, not even our ears or bodies experience music. We hear it on the surface of our eardrums, we hear it in the back of the din of the day. We feel it in our feet, but we don’t feel it in our fingertips, or in our guts.