Addled by Arias

I haven't written on this blog in forever. And some people (friends and loyal readers) have been asking me about it and about the CI. What's new? Yes, I'm still hearing. I'm still progressing. The time is overdue for an update.

Honestly, there are a number of things I've intended to reflect on for several weeks. All those reflections need is time. I'm at the stage in my listening journey where things are a little different. The mood has changed, and no longer am I suspended in tension and rapid-fire auditory discovery. I don't feel like my head spins in astonishment anymore as I walk through the world. All this has become, dare I say it, normalized. Or almost. I still have my moments, but the fact that I'm taking more and more things for granted is a mark of success in itself, isn't it? I don't think my progress has slowed, exactly. It's more that I've reached a place where I no longer have so much novelty to reflect on from day to day. The learning curve seems to have gone underground. Most of what I'm learning is unconscious. It's a much better place to be, really, but it does have its hazards.

More reflection to come soon, but for now I wanted to take the time to recount something more immediate. This past Wednesday I went to the opera! I put an exclamation point there because whenever I do hearing-person things like this I just smirk. Up to San Francisco we went, dressed up and ready to see Bizet's Carmen, and inside my head I kept laughing. Don't you see, I wanted to say to my peers (this was a dorm-organized trip). A deaf person is going to the opera with you! This didn't seem to strike any of them as odd (of course), and when we reached our seats way up in the nosebleed section I was just another one of the group. Now, my thoughts about opera now are less extensive than the first time I experienced it last summer, but here's what I walked away with:

1. Operas are long. Duh. But, more than being long, they draw on in seeming pursuit of the suspension of a moment, the definition of a mood through setting and music. It's an almost nostalgic form, in that you can see the present (and its accompanying cause and effect) slipping away from you even in the course of its happening, and even despite its elongation. Even if, after a few hours, all you want to do is truncate that elongation and have it be over.

2. Following the above observation: I'm an English major in college, which means that on a regular basis I spend too much time thinking about words and verbal narrative. The overall narrative structure of the opera bored me a bit, because honestly its complexity and its pacing seemed pared down. But here's what I wondered: is the operatic format one that seeks to augment this storytelling structure with the presence of music? Is music, and not character or plot or language, the main point of the opera? Probably.

3. I've enjoyed symphonic music in the past, and I still do, but I had a difficult time maintaining my interest in that music while also following a storyline. My mind wanted one or the other: give me a novel or a story or a play, or give me a symphony to listen to. I couldn't seem to find a comfortable place to settle in between. Also troublesome was the fact that of course Carmen was sung in French, but the supertitles were in English. I experience a strange sort of auditory disconnect when what I'm hearing doesn't line up with what I'm seeing. Sight is still by far my dominant sense, and when I don't encounter sound as an affirmation or a reward, that sound tends to become less interesting to me. I oftentimes end up ignoring it, to be honest.

4. I would have seriously loved someone there to explain the mechanics of the operatic sounds/music/singing/etc. to me, or at least to pinpoint its intention and mood. I'm still not very good at understanding the "feel" of a particular piece of music (mostly because, probably illogically, I want to know what it means) and I wondered what I was missing in terms of tone and ambiance. It sounded nice, and some arias sent chills down my spine, but... well, on my own I'm woefully incapable of saying anything else.

Overall, at the end of the night I walked out having enjoyed myself, happy that I'd had the experience, smug that I'd heard it and hadn't been bored out of my mind, but still feeling uncertain of what it was I'd witnessed/heard and its significance. Maybe it's that I was out of my element musically, but I think it bothered me that I couldn't say whether Carmen had been good or not. The story? Not so much, in my opinion. Too little pacing and too little solid character and too long to get through it all. But it had to be more than that; the overall performance wasn't just about what happened on stage. And my judgment, my listening, and my knowledge was way too insufficient to gauge that.

This last point hit home for me yesterday afternoon, when I ran into a friend on campus who asked me if I'd gone to see Carmen on Wednesday. (She'd heard about the dorm trip.) "Well, how was the performance?" she asked. "I was thinking of going."

"It was good," I said. And... that was all. I honestly couldn't say anything else. Going beyond that would have delved into the realm of I-was-hearing-this-for-the-first-time and this-was-my-first-real-opera and it-sounded-good-but-I-don't-really-know and... argh. A typical hearing-person answer, I imagined, would have been something like, "The symphonic accompaniment was really top-notch and the sopranos gave a stellar performance, especially what's-her-name who played so-and-so and has such-and-such kind of voice, although the tenors were a bit creaky, and I really loved so-and-so's expressiveness and vocal power as Don Jose." But what do I know. This was my first moment of being asked to judge something acoustically and totally laughably failing. Which, hey, is to be expected. It just made me feel unsettled and inadequate.

So, the real question: do I like opera? In bits and pieces, yes. The purity and drama (or whatever it is) of the sound appeals to me. But my overwhelming sense of not being able to understand it at all, and wondering if the essence of the performance is beyond my comprehension even with a CI, lingers with me. I'll need to chew this one over.

A Meeting With Mahler

Last night I went on a grant-funded trip to the San Francisco Symphony - something I couldn't have imagined myself doing a year ago, much less enjoying. This was the first time I'd ever been to a symphony or to a large concert hall, although I think I once might have been dragged to a orchestral performance when I was little. (In which I sat, bored and frustrated and fidgety. Nothing about the actual orchestra stands out in my mind, only that sense of interior confinement and angst.)

Needless to say, this time was different. It's now been almost eleven months since I got my cochlear implant (how does the time go so fast?), and the sense of curiosity and bravery that I now have about trying new sound-oriented events is, I think, one of the best outcomes of that journey. Walking into the symphony, I did not worry about what artistic impression I would grasp or how I would sit through it for an hour and a half. I did not worry about being excluded. I just went, feeling eager and admittedly a little bit proud to be able to experience it with everybody else. When the music started, I leaned forward and watched - and, more importantly, listened - for a span of time that seemed to fly by but also hang suspended in the eternal expansion of a moment.

I regret to say that what I heard, I lack the vocabulary to describe. The language of music lies beyond every form of language that I've learned to use. All I can say is that I liked it, was borne aloft by it, even, although I cannot say why. The symphony in San Francisco was playing Mahler's Symphony No. 6, and as the first movement started I felt the usual sensations that I feel when trying to settle into a piece of complex music. I twiddled my CI volume, trying to get it exactly right as the notes settled into a whisper and then swelled, almost knocking me back into my seat with their sudden energy.

Volume set, I listened. Or tried to. My mind, as usual, got fidgety. My gaze roved about. I studied the people sitting in front of me, looked at the architecture and the patterns on the ceiling. I tried to count how many symphony players there were, to see when their instruments were coming in and out. I thought of the most off-topic, improbable things. It wasn't that I was bored, or that the symphony failed to hold my attention. It was that, once again, I'm simply not used to surrendering my thoughts to listening. My mind clings too strongly to the visual and the imaginative. It is too used to amusing itself when the auditory information of the world goes whizzing by. Anything to do with sound still feels foreign.

But, finally, about an hour into the symphony, I felt those old habits starting to loosen their grip. (I shake my head that it took that long.) The mental fidgeting stopped, and I relaxed into the music. It struck me that I was being transported to the fringes of a different state of consciousness, or of thinking, which was the same state of consciousness that the conductor and all the players must have existed in. The symphony seemed to draw collective breaths before my eyes (or ears!), to flow from one section to the next like a giant living thing. It exhausted me to think of playing an instrument for as long as they did; I thought of the physical precision, the mental sharpness of timing each note to merge with the rest. Yet the players kept going, tirelessly, the conductor breathing energy into their efforts like a bellows. I did not want it to end. It seemed that it never would or could.

When I stood up to applaud like the rest, I only wished I'd been able to summarize what I'd heard. But the symphony had taught me more about music than I'd known walking in the door: I now could pick out when various instruments came in, or slightly anticipate the feeling that linked one section to the next. I'd learned to have my interest piqued by auditory surprises (such as when someone rang a drum that looked like a large sledgehammer and made me jump). Most of all, I realized how much I enjoyed the (for lack of a better word) organic feel of this kind of performance. Not only did I enjoy listening - I also enjoyed watching, soaking in the atmosphere, being there. On the way back from San Francisco, when the people I was with turned on rock music in the car, it just wasn't the same.

An Encounter With Beethoven

The scene: Christmas orchestra concert in Magdalen College chapel. My first such event since the CI. I enter to the sound of instruments warming up. My brochure says that Mendelssohn and Beethoven's second symphony are on tab. Okay, I'll take it.

The light inside is soft against the vaulted stone, the air outside dark and cold. Promptly at 7:30, the conductor walks in, straight-backed and taut. Everyone comes to attention: the audience, the orchestra members. The space of the chapel is intimate, the bass player sits only five yards away from me. Bows are poised. They begin.

The sound washes over me, but at first I am all eyes. I am too used to seeing. The sweep and flow of the conductor's arms fascinates me, seems to imply what I should be getting out of the music, and soon it occurs to me that in the rise and fall of the orchestra I can hear various instruments come in. I am supercharged, trying to watch what I'm hearing, rather than simply hear. I see a bow rise: my eyes rush over. The course of the piece seems to change: I glance through the seats and the instruments, trying to figure out why. Mendelssohn's energy is there for me, tangible, but just out of reach.

Then, slowly, I settle. There comes a time at the end of the piece when I realize that, without meaning to, I have stopped watching. The sound rises before me, becomes dominant. I don't need to fixate on the conductor conducting or the instruments playing. My CI volume is turned as high as it can go without my head splitting. The music calls me into meditation.

Next, Beethoven. I am absolutely struck by how different each movement sounds from the others. Allegro, larghetto, scherzo - I have no idea what these mean, but they each launch off with a different mood, a different energy. Yet by the fourth movement I can vaguely sense how each has built on the one before it, even if I can't describe how. I can't describe, either, what the music is about, or what it expresses, but I feel its tingling movement. It is full of grappling tension, the ebb and flow of a compressed intelligence. Parts give me chills.

The instruments layer and come together, then part ways and divide, but my favorite parts are when only one or two instruments can be heard, in a sort of repose, a light thread of melody. The rest is almost too complex, too flurried and impenetrable. The only exception is when they all quicken. At such moments, I seem to quicken too.

It strikes me at one point that, sitting here six months ago, I would have been bored. Fidgety. Looking into the faces of my fellow audience members, trying to assess what value they found in this. This is what I remember from all the other musical performances I've attended (or been forced to attend).

But it's not that way anymore. It's not about the past, or even the future. The music calls me into the present moment. It's hard for me to stop thinking analytically, but eventually I do. I respond to what I am hearing at that instant before it glides and morphs into something else. I sit absolutely still, almost like I've lost consciousness of my own body, of everything but this strange new sense.

I walk out at a loss for words. I really don't know what I have just experienced. I'm just glad that I am no longer missing out.