Let’s talk about something that may signal the end of civilization. Okay, maybe it’s not quite that serious, but it’s close. Multi-tasking. If you are young, you may be always multi-tasking and consider it so normal that you don’t even know there’s a word for it.
Multi-tasking may be appropriate in certain situations, but it is the enemy of every serious endeavor, and it will defeat your efforts to learn music if you let it creep into your listening routine.
Nobody does anything seriously and well while trying to do a lot of other things simultaneously. A professional NASCAR driver is not chomping on a hamburger and texting his girlfriend while he circles the track at 200 mph. How would you feel if your doctor insisted on watching “Dancing With the Stars” in the examination room?
Listening to music seriously requires you to pay attention. Yet much of the music we encounter these days is background music. It plays constantly in stores, in elevators, when we are on hold, and as a backdrop to conversation in restaurants. Someone has put it there to mask silence and to manipulate your emotions.
I have a simple rule: If music is worth listening to, then stop what you’re doing and listen to it. The corollary is this: If the music is not important enough to cause you to stop what you’re doing, then turn it off.
Now that sounds rather drastic and rigid, but I allow some exceptions. If you are engaged in a routine activity that does not require you to listen to something else, then you can probably listen to music while you do it. Driving alone or cooking dinner are good examples. It is possible to use your hands productively while listening to music. It is not possible to use your mouth or your ears on an unrelated task while listening to music. The listening won’t happen.
I encourage anything that adds to your focus on the music. For me, that has usually meant listening at night when I can set aside all distractions. Other members of the family are hopefully asleep. The phone is not likely to ring. I like listening with a good set of headphones (not earbuds!); it blocks out other sounds and puts the music up close and personal. I also like listening in darkness. If I could, I would enter a realm where I am conscious of nothing but the music, where there are no other stimuli. That may sound extreme to you, and it may sound positively frightening to a committed multi-tasker. But isn’t that essentially what you try to achieve in a movie theater—to focus all of your attention on the screen and to feel like you have entered some other time and place?
You will likely discover your own time and place for listening. If it permits you to focus on the music, then do it. If it doesn’t, or if you think you are the exceptional person who can really hear music while watching TV and chatting on the phone with your friends, then you might want to stick to “on hold” and elevator music. It was written especially for multitaskers.
