The Look of Listening

I’ve never forgotten the plain simple wisdom of watching the student’s face and eyes, which are ever present via Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom.

The directive comes from the Lamperti School injunction to beware of tension about the eyes, one which has led me to observe all manner of things.

The squinting student who may need glasses, or is driving with the brakes on—the latter involving too much flexion and not enough extension of the body.

The wide-eyed student who may be excited, or hyper-extending and braced for impact.

The droopy-eyed student who may need sleep, isn’t firing on all cylinders, or is somewhere else entirely.

The fixed-eyed student who may be pissed off, or on the autism spectrum.

There really is a look of listening, the overall expression of the face and body revealing the listening posture of the ear through the facial nerve, which inserts into the middle ear via the stapedius muscle. (Paul Madaule has written an excellent article on this subject which you can find here.) The canny voice teacher can even see what the vocal tone is going to sound like before the student opens their mouth.

The great Joan Sutherland?

A curious case I have written about before, I only heard her sing live but once, quite late in her career. The voice hovered in front of my face: utterly exciting, breathtaking (one literally held one’s breath in aesthetic arrest), and drawing to mind the Italian appellation: La Stupenda!

She had a remarkable head-neck relationship; displaying a significant degree of extension, more than usually observed in classical singers.

Why is that? I wondered.

I saw it from the back of Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall), and in YouTube videos: the degree of extension increasing over the years until Sutherland was fairly looking down from a great height at the audience.

The early videos from the 1960’s? The extension wasn’t as marked, and I understood her diction better.

Then I saw an interview where the great soprano spoke out of the left side of her mouth—and not just in that one interview—and realized that she, like me, was mixed-dominant. And my head exploded.

Knowing that the left ear cannot rise to the occasion that the right ear does—the right ear processing higher frequencies faster than the left, I wondered if Sutherland’s spine was compensating big time.

“The ear is the spine; the spine is the ear.” —Alfred Tomatis