Jason Weiss, "Listenings" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

New Books in Music

Listenings (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023) is a collection of meditations on the art of experiencing sound. The writings reflect Jason Weiss's passion for illuminating details, momentary experiences, and the most subtle and brief of auditory stimulations to consider their role in thought and emotion. The chapter-sections, each on a particular subtheme, invite us to visit concerts, to analyze music, to interpret sounds far and near, from friends, parents, relatives, and strangers, and to appreciate and esteem them as a key part of the human condition.

Listenings summons readers to reflect but also to consider listening as an artform, a dialogue, and a locus of experiences – to make music by listening. Jason Weiss adroitly argues that to listen is not merely to perceive sound as a stimulus but to interpret, to participate, to reflect, to engage in an activity that can shift from a passive one toward a new creative beginning.

This conversation includes Jason Weiss, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M). They discuss listening as a creative resource; the importance of listening in memory; Weiss’s precise and harmonious approach to linking language, sound and listening; the role of technology how we interpret sound; and the role of listening in the author’s life, experiences and creative process.

This interview, our podcast, and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes were made possible by generous support from the Mellon Foundation.

This is our second episode on Listenings - the first, on New Books Network en español, is available here.

Topics discussed in the interview:

• Listening in translingual environments.
• Music, performance, concerts.
• Travel, distance, and new language contexts.
• Technology and sound.
• When Jason Weiss met Jorge Luis Borges in Paris.
• The circumstances surrounding Roland Barthes’s death.
• Jason Weiss’s book The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Literature in Paris and our podcast episode on that title.

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