The Art of Listening

A concert lecture with the pianist Annabel Guaita

Join Annabel on a journey into the inner landscape of music. The audience will listen to three piano pieces played twice. Based on phenomenology of music, the lines are drawn between music, man and life in a simple and fascinating way.

Music offers us something that no other art form can. Music cannot be seen or touched, the notes disappear as quickly as they are played. Nevertheless, there is the possibility that we don't just listen from one moment to the next, but can also get an experience of the whole, the narrative structure of the music. In order to make long pieces of music give such meaning, it requires the presence of us as listeners. But this can only happen when we are connected to the music and active 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