Value for Friday of Week 27 in the season of Ripening

Communicating: Listening and Discussing

Our complex, highly developed human capacity for language is a major part of human life. Doing it right is central to our well-being as individuals, and as a species.

In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers. [Fred Rogers.]
Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues. [Rumi]
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. [Franz Kafka]
The great enemy of communication . . . is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society–and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding. [William H. Whyte]
Our words have the power to change destinies, both our own and that of others. [Yehuda Berg]

Language is not quite uniquely human but human language far surpasses that of any other species. It is the means by which we communicate with each other, and because of that it is central to human life as we know it. Listening is the receptive end of communication, and it refers not only to the auditory but to every form of communication. “Listening” is merely a word we use to express the general idea of receiving input from others about their ideas, feelings, experiences and any other kind of information.

Turn-taking. When someone else is speaking, politeness dictates that we not interrupt. This is far more than a mere convention in polite society. We cannot learn if we do not listen. In fact, listening is how we learn language.

Turn-taking is an essential part of language development and evolution. “The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking.” Because we cannot effectively receive information if we are too busy transmitting it, humans and non-human animals take turns transmitting information. Too-quick responses are positively correlated with less effective listening. Ghazanfar and Takahashi argue that “human vocal cooperation (turn-taking) may have arisen through a combination of volubility and prosociality”. Turn-taking skills begin to appear shortly after the first birthday.

Human “speakers begin to plan their turns as soon as sufficient information is available to do so, irrespective of further incoming words”. This is “consistent with models of turn-taking that assume that next speakers (a) start planning their response as soon as the incoming turn’s message can be understood and (b) monitor the incoming turn for cues to turn-completion so as to initiate their response when turn-transition becomes relevant”. Turn-taking “requires the ability to process on-going turns at talk while planning the next, and to launch this next turn without considerable overlap or delay”.

“In every-day conversations, the gap between turns of conversational partners is most frequently between 0 and 200 ms.” This is one-fifth of a second or less. “Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, (Stivers, et. al., concluded) that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns.” Corps, et. al., argue: “Listeners use content predictions to determine what to say but not when to say it”.

Scott, et. al., propose that “motor cortex activation is essential in joint speech, particularly for the timing of turn taking”. EEG studies have explored the phenomenon of turn-taking, with Ahn, et. al., making a case for “(i)nterbrain phase synchronization during turn-taking verbal interaction”. Response-planning may take place may take place several seconds before the end of the question.

Visual cues play a substantial role. Children may be inclined to focus more on the mouth or on the eyes, depending on whether the other party in the conversation is speaking, and on whether the listener can hear or is deaf. In a study by Nota, et. al.: “Most facial signals occurred early in the utterance, and had earlier onsets in questions.”. Non-linguistic turn-taking, which is also a method of communication, has been studied in chimpanzees.

The work on turn-taking has been applied in interprofessional team meetings, physician-patient communication, parent-child interaction and training, mother-infant interaction, teacher-preschooler interactions, interactions among pre-verbal infants, mother interactions with term versus pre-term infants, parent-child interaction in infant deafness, and child-to-child interactions. “Pre-linguistic infants employ complex communicative loops to engage mothers in social exchanges and repair interaction ruptures”. “Despite broad differences in the overall talkativeness of mothers and infants, maternal and infant contingent vocal responsiveness is found across communities, supporting essential functions of turn taking in early-childhood socialization.” A comparison of studies on turn-taking in Swedish, indigenous Australian and Japanese, populations supports the cultural role in shaping the dynamics of turn-taking in particular human cultures. Research on communicative turn-taking among bonobos and chimpanzees, monkeys, marmosets, infant marmosets, bats, meerkats, harbor seal pups, and starlings, strongly supports the deep evolutionary roots of turn-taking.

Now that we humans have language, we can purposefully direct it. This becomes a part of our language evolution. A cultivated skill of turn-taking is an example of this: “Using parentese, a socially and linguistically enhanced speaking style, improves children’s social language turn-taking and language skills.” Romeo, et. al., argue that their findings based on “conversational turn-taking following a family-based intervention “suggest that conversational turns support language development through cortical growth in language and social processing regions”. Kilan, et. al., found that in interpreter-mediated psychiatric consultations, “despite interpreters and clinicians having the patient’s best interests at heart, it is the patient’s voice that becomes lost while the clinician and interpreter negotiate the roles played by each party”, including turn-taking. “Children coordinate in a recurrent social dilemma by taking turns and along dominance asymmetries”. This information should be useful and comforting to people who are mindful about listening and discussing, instead of merely dominating or disrupting conversations.

Real

True Narratives

General histories:

John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 1999): “For Peters, the concept of communication has evolved in tandem with its technology, leaving us chasing a moving target rather than closing in on a fixed ideal.”
Daphne A. Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2021): “Brooks, who teaches at Yale, is explicit about wanting to connect two worlds that would seem to be distinct: those of intellectual theory and commercial appeal. One doesn’t have to exclude the other, she says, even if traditional rock criticism has supposed that market success must come at the expense of that vague and vaunted quality known as 'authenticity.'”
Mónica Guzmán, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times (BenBella Books, 2022): “Can We Empathize With Our Enemies? One Author Wants Us to Try.”

Episodic histories:

Sarah Glidden, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (Drawn & Quarterly, 2017). “In the midst of her cultural wanderings . . . Glidden pieces together something that newspaper reporters often miss . . . By talking to people and living their lives, she unearths very real people and their real stories.”

From the dark side:

Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI (Random House, 2024): “In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1994).
Michael P. Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening, Second Edition: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships (The Guilford Press, 2009).
Mark Brady, ed., The Wisdom of Listening (Wisdom Publications, 2003).
Paul J. Donoghue and Mary E. Siegel, Are You Really Listening?: Keys to Successful Communication (Sorin Books, 2005).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

Poetry

Now I will do nothing but listen,

To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals,

I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,

Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals,

The angry base of disjointed friendship, the faint tones of the sick,

The judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-sentence,

The heave'e'yo of stevedores unlading ships by the wharves, the refrain of the anchor-lifters,

The ring of alarm-bells, the cry of fire, the whirr of swift-streaking engines and hose-carts with premonitory tinkles and color'd lights,

The steam-whistle, the solid roll of the train of approaching cars,

The slow march play'd at the head of the association marching two and two,

(They go to guard some corpse, the flag-tops are draped with black muslin.)

I hear the violoncello, ('tis the young man's heart's complaint,)

I hear the key'd cornet, it glides quickly in through my ears,

It shakes mad-sweet pangs through my belly and breast.

I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,

Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.

A tenor large and fresh as the creation fills me,

The orbic flex of his mouth is pouring and filling me full.

I hear the train'd soprano (what work with hers is this?)

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies,

It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them,

It sails me, I dab with bare feet, they are lick'd by the indolent waves,

I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,

Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,

And that we call Being.

[Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-92), Book III: Song of Myself, 26.]

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

The piano trio may be the most naturally conversational of all chamber forms. The reason is written into the instruments themselves. Unlike the string quartet — four members of one family, so alike in timbre that they can melt into a single voice — the piano trio yokes together instruments that do not blend at all. The piano is a different order of being: percussive where the strings sustain, harmonically self-sufficient where they are single lines, able, if it chooses, to play the whole texture alone. The violin sings in the soprano; the cello sings, in its own darker register, an octave and a world away. Three unlike voices, no two of the same nature — and no way to fuse them into one. Whatever unity the form achieves, it must achieve as agreement, not as sameness.

That is what makes every piano trio a conversation rather than a chorus. Because the piano could dominate, its restraint becomes a choice we can hear; because the strings could be reduced to accompaniment — as they often were in Haydn's trios, and even Mozart's, where a string part might be removed with little lost — a composer who grants them real independence is staging something closer to a democracy of voices. This clarity is peculiar to the trio: add players — a piano quartet, a quintet — and the extra strings begin to blend among themselves into a consort that answers the piano as a bloc, so that the texture thickens toward the orchestral and the distinct three-way exchange gives way to something more like two massed forces in dialogue. The great trios refuse even the easier hierarchy of three. The piano proposes and the strings answer, or qualify, or press back; a line begun by the cello is taken up by the violin and handed, transformed, to the keyboard; the three attend to one another across genuine difference in weight and color, listening as much as speaking. No one rules, but neither do they simply merge. What we overhear is the sound of unlike parties working something out by turns — which is to say, the sound of people, at their best, doing the same.

And because it is a conversation, it has a character, and the character differs from work to work. Some of these dialogues are warm and companionable, three friends finishing each other's sentences; others are tense, even competitive, the instruments straining across an incompatibility the composer refuses to smooth over. Some arrive at agreement and close on it; others break off unresolved, the argument left open. What follows is a gathering of piano trios worth knowing, each with a word on the kind of conversation it is — for the form's deepest subject was never a single mood or idea, but the oldest and most necessary human act: the willingness of different voices to listen to one another, and to reply.

Anton Reicha, Piano Trios (1805-1824): A conversation among genuine equals, and among the first in the literature to be so — Reicha gives the strings real independent voices where Haydn and Mozart still let them accompany, so the three parts genuinely question and answer one another. The mood is inquisitive rather than dramatic: three curious minds turning a subject over, full of unexpected harmonic swerves and dry wit, listening closely and rarely raising their voices.
Franz Schubert, Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major, D. 898, Op. 99 (1827) (approx. 36-50’) (recordings): The friendliest conversation on the list — three companions in easy agreement, the talk flowing so warmly that Schumann said one glance at it made the troubles of existence disappear. Dialogue as fellowship: no one contends, because no one needs to.
Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major, D. 929, Op. 100 (1827) (approx. 44-62’) (recordings): darker and more searching exchange than its sunlit sibling — passion, pathos, even anger passing among the players, yet answered each time by grace and a hard-won triumphant beauty. The famous cello theme is a voice that keeps returning to speak its grief, and the others keep gathering around it. Dialogue as consolation offered across sorrow.
Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49, MWV Q29 (1839) (approx. 28-30’) (recordings): An animated, forward-rushing conversation, everyone talking at once in the best way — restless agitation in the first movement, a darting scherzo, a headlong finale. The piano is brilliant and quick but the strings keep pace; the pleasure is watching three virtuosos spur one another to run faster. “Despite its famed lyricism, the trio as a whole is full of driving energy, from the restless agitation of the first movement to the animated dance of the scherzo to the powerful forward rush of the finale.”
Alexander Ernst Fesca, Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 12 (1843) (approx. 31’): Warm, songful, unfairly forgotten dialogues in the early-Romantic manner — lyrical exchanges more concerned with melody shared around the circle than with argument or tension. Conversation as gracious company.
Fesca, Piano Trio No. 5 in B minor, Op. 46 (1845) (approx. 33’)
Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, Op. 66 (1845) (approx. 28-30’) (recordings): More fiery and more finely wrought than the first — the piano impressive and driving, but reined by a precision of phrasing that keeps it from overrunning the strings. A conversation held at speed but under strict manners, everyone's articulation exact. Dialogue as disciplined ardor.
Franz Berwald, Piano Trio No. 1 in E-flat Major (1845, rev. 1850) (approx. 20’) (recordings): The most immediately winning of the Swede's four — bright, open, and formally inventive, with Berwald's habit of running movements together so the talk never quite pauses for breath. A buoyant, forward-leaning conversation among three quick minds. Dialogue as high-spirited invention.
Berwald, Piano Trio No. 2 in F minor (1851) (approx. 22’) (recordings): The darkest-hued of the set, its minor key giving the exchange a restless, searching quality. Berwald's oddly angled harmonies keep the parties slightly off-balance, questioning rather than settling. Dialogue as unresolved searching.
Berwald, Piano Trio No. 4 in C Major (1853) (approx. 19’) (recordings): The sunniest and most genial — C-major openness, clean textures, three voices in easy accord. The wit is lighter here, the surprises gentler. Dialogue as untroubled good humor.
Berwald, Piano Trio No. 3 in D Minor (1854) (approx. 23’) (recordings): The last-composed and arguably the most ambitious, its D-minor gravity giving the conversation weight and reach. The voices press harder, the argument runs deeper, and the whole feels like a summation of Berwald's peculiar, independent voice. Dialogue as mature reckoning Berwald is the most quietly original voice here — a Swedish outsider whose four trios converse in unexpected forms, moods shifting mid-sentence, movements running together without pause. Across his four trios, the talk is quick, quirky, and unpredictable, three parties who follow a thought wherever it darts. Dialogue as lively improvisation between friends who finish each other's surprising turns.
Camille Saint-Saëns, Piano Trio No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18 (1863) (approx. 23-30’) (recordings): Spacious, transparent, elegant — the "French Mozart" at his most companionable, simple materials passed lightly from hand to hand and developed with unclouded clarity. A sunlit, well-mannered conversation with nothing to prove and nothing withheld.
Claude Debussy, Piano Trio in G Major, L. 5 (1880) (approx. 22-24’) (recordings): The work of an eighteen-year-old, and it charms rather than argues — a gentle, lyrical salon exchange, sensibility over drama. Not yet the radical Debussy; a young man's graceful, tentative first attempt at three-way talk, all courtesy and color. It “is a full-fledged four movement work with a prevailing French and ever so slightly salon style characterized by lyricism, clarity and gentle sensibility that is charming more than dramatic.”
Ernest Chausson, Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 3 (1881) (approx. 32-34’) (recordings): An intense, Franckian conversation, ardent and shadowed, the voices pressing toward one another with real emotional urgency. Youthful, sometimes overfull, but sincere — dialogue as impassioned confession rather than polite exchange.
Saint-Saëns, Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 92, R. 129 (1892) (approx. 31-35’) (recordings): A cooler, more balanced counterpart to the Wagnerian fever of its era — five movements of sparkling, pristine line and clear, direct brushwork. The parties are elegant and composed, the exchange proportioned and lucid. Dialogue as sanity, held against hysteria. “A counterbalance to the Wagner hysteria can be heard . . . It’s music which is filled with sparkling, pristine lines and a lightness and elegance that is distinctly French. Its brushstrokes are clear and direct, unlocking a world of shimmering color. Its five movements give the work a sense of balance and proportion.”
Sergey Taneyev, Piano Trio in D major, Op. 22 (1908) (approx. 38-39’) (recordings): A dense, disciplined, contrapuntal conversation that rewards close attention — the Russian master of counterpoint sets his three voices in taut interplay that generates a real creative tension. Not a relaxed talk but a rigorous one, three learned parties testing each other's logic — careful listening, producing a creative tension
Maurice Ravel, Piano Trio in A minor, M. 67 (1914) (approx. 26-28’) (recordings): “. . . Ravel . . . has a tendency, both here and in his later Violin Sonata, to dwell on what he described as the incompatibility of the piano’s percussive sound and the sustained tones of the string instruments. This juxtaposition is, in fact, an essential factor in what makes the music so alluring; the sense of competition is palpable, although there is a distant quality to the emotional tone.” This trio presents the tensest dialogue on the list, and deliberately so — Ravel dwells on the very incompatibility of the percussive piano and the sustained strings, so the sense of competition is palpable and never fully smoothed away. Yet the strain is what makes it alluring, held at a cool emotional distance: dialogue across a difference the composer refuses to reconcile. This is the conversation that does not resolve — and is greater for it.
Gabriel Faurè, Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120 (1923) (approx. 21-24’) (recordings): A late, spare, valedictory exchange — spirited and luminous on the surface, darkly cast beneath by its D-minor key. Written when Fauré was seventy-eight and almost completely deaf, it is a conversation composed by a man who could no longer hear it: dialogue offered into a silence, on faith that the voices still answer one another. The most moving entry here, and the right one to close on. “Despite the spirited playfulness and the luminous, exotic modalities throughout the trio, the predominating key of d minor lends the music a certain dark cast. One of his very last works, the trio was written in 1924 when Fauré was 78 and most likely completely deaf.”

In 1964, two of the twentieth century’s greatest composers — who had plenty to discuss — each composed a string quartet.

Mieczysław Weinberg, String Quartet No. 10 in A minor, Op. 85 (1964) (approx. 22–25'): A quartet of memory and mourning, from the stretch of Weinberg's life — the Eighth through Tenth quartets — when he was living, as he later said, off recollections of the family murdered in the Holocaust and the lost Warsaw of his happiest years. Its four movements move through strange and shifting country: a powerful but measured opening; a ghostly, anxious scherzo, muted and dancing on tiptoes; a short, slashing, searing adagio; and an enigmatic waltz that closes the work darkly unresolved. The conversation is hushed and grieving rather than combative — four voices gathered around a sorrow, each taking up and passing on the same shadowed material. It carries, too, a dialogue larger than itself: in the very year Weinberg wrote it, his friend and rival Shostakovich composed his own Tenth Quartet and dedicated it to Weinberg, having declared their quartet-writing a friendly "race" in which Weinberg had pulled ahead. So the piece sits inside a conversation between two of the century's great voices, each answering the other across their parallel lives — the string quartet as dialogue not only among four instruments, but between two composers who spent a lifetime listening and replying.
Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 10 in A-flat major, Op. 118 (1964) (approx. 22') (recordings): The other half of a conversation. In the same year Weinberg wrote his Tenth, Shostakovich wrote his — composed in ten days at a composers' retreat in Armenia — and dedicated it to Weinberg, the friend and rival whose nine quartets had, in Shostakovich's own playful telling, "overtaken" his eight and spurred him to catch up. It is a work of shifting temperatures: a first movement of soft dynamics and searching quiet, opening on a bare four-note motif in the solo violin; then a furioso second movement whose violence is unique in all his quartets, the four instruments no longer conversing but colliding; a grave passacaglia for its slow heart, the oldest form of patient repetition, one voice laying down a ground the others build upon in turn; and a finale that gathers the earlier material back up and quotes across the work, memory folding in on itself. Where Weinberg's Tenth turns inward to mourn, Shostakovich's swings between hushed restraint and open fury — but the two speak the same language, trade the same gestures, and were written, in the same season, each with the other in mind. Heard together, they are the string quartet's deepest claim made literal: not four instruments in dialogue, but two lifelong artists answering each other across their parallel work — listening, and replying, in the form they both loved most.