Deep Listening

“The capacity to ‘enter’ the imaginary landscape of the musical narrative is what musical perception really means. We can call this ‘deep listening:’ the alert attention which puts, for the duration of the concert, our ego and our intellect on a shelf, to be taken back at the cloakroom where we fortify ourselves again for the Real World, with our deepest identity confirmed and our hopes, however irrational, restored.”
~John Borstlap