Training your senses deepens power of the arts

My late father-in-law was a great bassoonist, one of the best in the world during his career from 1935 to 1992. Obviously, in art, “best” is a matter of taste and opinion, but Leonard Sharrow was revered. When his wife, my mother-in-law, went to Russia in the 1960s and met bassoonists there, she told me that they actually knelt and kissed the hem of her skirt. His recording of Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, made in 1947 with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, set a standard for a new American style of bassoon playing.

What made him so great? My husband Neil tells me it was about his tone. That’s a complicated thing: a combination of the instrument itself, the reeds that bassoonists painstakingly make, embouchure (the use of the lips, facial muscles, tongue and teeth), breath control and artistic choices. He controlled those factors to make a unique, more beautiful sound on his bassoon. 

Here’s the thing, and it makes me sad and a bit ashamed: I thought it was something I would never be able to hear. I heard Leonard play many times, including at our wedding, and the sounds that came from his bassoon were beautiful and moving, but I figured I was responding to the piece itself, not necessarily to the tone of the bassoon. 

I had little to compare it to: I didn’t grow up with classical music and have never applied myself to listening to it. I played the flute in middle school until I saw the anguished expression on my teacher’s face while she tried to explain, again, that eighth notes are half the length of quarter notes. I do enjoy listening to symphonic and chamber music, but it’s like this: The music lasts for some amount of time, something happens to me, but I don’t know how or why. I have enjoyed hearing, say, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, but it didn’t make me cry, as it did someone sitting next to me at Music Hall once, and I really can’t tell the difference between one violin soloist and the next. 

And that’s OK. One doesn’t have to be trained or educated to enjoy what’s in music. Just as you don’t have to have an educated palate to enjoy drinking wine, or have a master’s in art history to appreciate the paintings of Fra Angelico. There are people who can hear, or see, or taste more than other people, maybe an inborn ability, but mostly because they have trained their senses. Like learning a foreign language, something that is undifferentiated to you can reveal more meaning and form until it starts making sense. 

I have ears. Maybe I could train them. I wondered if, with enough attention, I could recognize Leonard’s tone. Neil made me a mixtape of various bassoonists’ performances of a particular passage from the Andante movement of the Mozart concerto, and an almost-solo bassoon passage from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” A few were from before Leonard’s time, most were more recent. 

As I listened over and over, I could tell there were differences, and I tried to use words to describe them, because my brain needs names. I thought Leonard sounded velvety, maybe, or creamy. I had a feeling of his bassoon taking up more space, of his notes having more dimension to them, with room for emotion. The pre-Leonard clips were clearly distinguishable, with a clear, not especially dimensional sound. Later ones were harder to distinguish, but some seemed a little more reedy, or could a bassoon be brassy? This one sounded clear and bell-like, this one more rounded. I’m sure styles have moved on since his time. 

When you’re trying to use your senses for something new, it helps to understand what’s technically going on. Like understanding that California chardonnay is often oaked, while French chardonnay like Chablis is not. Or if you know what Caravaggio does is called chiaroscuro, you can recognize it again. So once Neil pointed out that what his father innovated was a vibrato, and his tone was often described as “singing,” it helped me listen and understand what I was hearing. 

In the end, I’m not sure my dawning recognition was analytical or encompassable in language, but more like hearing a voice I’d become familiar with. When I had Neil play three of the audio clips blind, I picked Leonard out correctly on both pieces. I did it again the next day from different samples. 

I enjoyed spending time with Leonard again, who was not only a fine bassoonist, but a good father-in-law. And testing my own concentration and attention to hear new things reinforces a wonderful thing that I knew already. There are whole worlds of new sensory-based experiences available to anyone – beauty or meaning that is there, but unheard or unseen. All anyone has to do is use their senses with attention and concentration and the wonderful variations within the ways humans create art and beauty and find ways to create delight will show themselves.