Sir Simon Rattle conducts Pelleas et Melisande at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Linda Nylind
I was laying in bed this morning reading and listening to Radio 3. This is not a good idea. The reading damages the listening; the listening damages the reading. Combine Mozart and Melville and you get mixed messages. We are losing the art of listening (and, in my case, probably of reading with the necessary textual intensity, too).
A welcome initiative called Hear Here!, launched today by the Royal Philharmonic Society and Classic FM, aims to reverse the trend towards treating classical music as muzak. It will run throughout 2008, with live events, programmes on Classic FM and online projects designed to teach us to listen afresh.
I always knew my concentration wasn't great, but I thought I was a reasonable listener if I put my book away. That was until I met David McAlpine, the director of the UCL Ear Institute and an advisor to Hear Here! on the science behind good listening. He gave me a short test, developed by Isabelle Peretz at the University of Montreal, in which I had to listen to 60 pairs of brief tunes and say whether they were exact matches (click here if you want to try it). I found it much harder than I anticipated, got completely flummoxed, and scored a shade below average, despite claiming before the test that I had a great memory for a tune. It was a real eye-opener; shame it wasn't an ear-opener too.
When I go to classical concerts, I really do make an effort to listen and get very shirty with people who sit reading their programmes. Once, at a Sunday-afternoon Daniel Barenboim recital at the Royal Festival Hall, I saw one concertgoer sit through an entire Beethoven sonata reading a Sunday paper. Extraordinary, and deeply insulting. For all my efforts, however, it seems I have a long way to go before my ears and brain are truly switched on the sound waves coming from the stage.
It's not just Ms Peretz's test that has made me realise my own limitations. When I go to concerts with a friend who studied music, she hears differently - picking out separate strands, and hearing sections where I am often only aware of the wash of orchestral sound. The fact that she is a trained musician gives her a huge advantage: she has done a lot more serious listening and is hearing not just sounds but notes; she has grasped the language in a way I never will. But I like to think I can close the gap a little. Other "amateur" concertgoers I know insist they have taught themselves to listen more closely.
Classical music can be very demanding - at a recent performance of the Goldberg Variations at the Wigmore Hall I noticed that even the most sophisticated of audiences could find concentrating on Bach's wondrous piano cycle for 80 minutes a difficult task. The woman sitting next to me kept looking at her watch - at least she didn't take out a newspaper - and there was lots of pointless, time-filling reading of programmes. We audiences have to realise that we are part of the performance too.
It's encouraging that Classic FM is one of the partners in Hear Here! This, after all, is the station that is always telling us to "relax", as if classical music was the aural equivalent of Radox. It's not: it's demanding, effortful and sometimes downright painful. That Classic FM seems finally to have got that message - it will be analysing a major work in depth each month in 2008, treating its audience as listeners rather than consumers, perhaps even exhorting them to react rather than relax - suggests all is not lost for "serious" music. Hear Here! may be a bit of a naff title, but its heart - and its ears - are in the right place.
