Hearing and Being Heard

Hard-bitten professional musicians look away now…

I was ‘feeling the love’ after playing in the John Wilson Orchestra Prom last week (still on iPlayer folks…). There’s something affirming about the experience of playing in an orchestra, of being part of that delicate balancing act of creating a performance. What is John doing in the rehearsal process that creates the excitement? It’s partly about communicating attention to detail, an awareness that ‘I’m listening to you’ that keeps everyone on their toes. I felt like every one of my notes could be heard. This apparent aural omniscience is unnerving but also helpful. It implies that he will hear the subtleties of the individual contributions and that they will be appreciated, so that it’s worth making the effort: ‘tenor sax two bars before letter D (accompanying the big trumpet solo); start the vibrato a little earlier on the second minim of the bar please’.

This links to the therapist-client relationship. It’s the ‘I’m hearing you’ aspect of the therapist’s role that is analogous to the conductor. And to the players, the conductor is the representative of the audience, as well as the bridge to it. I’m not thinking too much about the people at the back of the hall because that’s his responsibility. He’s not so much the superego as the link to the other. This is analogous to the mother-infant relationship, where the mother is the connection to the outside world. It’s important not to overstate this in a professional context I suppose, because we’re all, also, just ‘turning up for work’ and ‘getting the job done’, but there’s something that makes a good performance feel really worthwhile, that’s more than just fulfilling a role. You are part of a collective experience which mirrors something fundamental about human relationships, about the need to hear and be heard.

Why do we need to be heard? Because we need to feel first that others are there, and then that they can understand us and that we are connected to them through shared experiences. The conductor, the therapist, the parent; all have a big responsibility, which is to allow this to happen.