The Art of Listening

A concert lecture with the pianist Annabel Guaita

The audience gets to listen twice to three short piano pieces by Edvard Grieg, Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. You will be guided through the music and together we will draw the lines between music, human being and life in a simple but fascinating way.

A piece of music can be experienced as a lifetime - played out in three minutes. Through this lecture, you will discover how tension, chaos and unrest are natural and in fact also absolutely necessary to be able to experience to achieve balance and harmony. We use our own breath as a tool to discover the music's own breath, but also the opposite: We use the music to get in touch with our breathing. Coming closer to the art of listening can therefore teach us what it means to listen to one’s own body and become more aware in your own life.

The audience is taken on a fascinating journey inside the music. You get to enjoy beautiful piano music and at the same time get a new perspective on the art of listening.

Annabel Guaita is an associate professor at The Grieg Academy of Bergen and an acclaimed pianist with a PhD in music. She has more than 20 years of national and international concert experience. She has developed the concept listener’s pilot, a method for presentation and exploration to guide the audience to discover their own potential as a listener.

As a listener’s pilot, she draws the audience into the musial works and opens up doors to classical music in a way that has not been done before. Guaita is regularly engaged by different music festivals in Norway and has also performed in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Helsinki and USA: Oregon, Seattle and California. She is regularly collaborating with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra giving lectures about listening to symphonic works. Her approach is deeply rooted in phenomenology of music, after many years of studies with the Catalan conductor Jordi Mora.

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The combination of her genuine commitment to music, high professional competence and not
least her genial and inclusive style makes Annabel an enthralling lecturer.

– Elisabeth Schanche, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen