🎙️Weekly Insight #56 - The Art of Listening: From Epictetus to Purcell

When the soul listens, the voice follows.

How listening deepens speech, song, and memory.

Epictetus often reminded his students that our human faculties come in pairs. Sight and vision, reason and choice, speech and hearing. Each depends on the other. What use is speaking without someone to hear? What use is listening if it never stirs response?

“for then my listening soul you move.” — Henry Purcell, If Music Be the Food of Love (text after Shakespeare, adapted by Henry Heveningham)

That line has stayed with me as I prepare for this week’s recital in Duluth Heights. One of the songs I’ll sing is Purcell’s If Music Be the Food of Love, with Heveningham’s line above. It’s a reminder that listening isn’t passive. To listen is to allow movement in the soul—something that shows up later in memory, in speech, even in the courage to sing.

Epictetus himself made this distinction. He said there’s a difference between “common hearing” and “musical hearing.”

Common hearing is universal: the ability to notice and distinguish sounds. Everyone has it, unless physically impaired.

Musical hearing is cultivated: the trained ability to recognize intervals, harmonies, or subtleties that only a musician (or someone with practice) can pick out.

The same is true of voice. Everyone has a basic vocal ability—to speak, to tell loud from soft, high from low. But trained vocal skill is something more: hearing subtle differences in tone, sustaining breath, or shaping vowels with intention.

So when Purcell writes, “for then my listening soul you move,” it’s not just about sound reaching the ear. It’s about the kind of listening that moves deeper, the kind we cultivate.

I’ve seen this in past recitals. At Quality Living Inc. in Omaha, many in the audience could not speak easily, but their listening was unmistakable. The silence in the room carried weight. In Chippewa Falls, people told me afterward not about my phrasing or technique, but about memories the music had stirred—moments that had been dormant until listening gave them life again.

Another line from Heveningham’s text is another line I’ve carried with me: “And all my senses feasted are, / Though yet the treat is only sound.”

That’s exactly what I’ve witnessed—listening that goes beyond the ear, stirring memory, emotion, and even the body.

The best artists also start with listening. Sinatra described his process in a way I’ve remembered ever since. He began not with the orchestra, not even with the melody, but with the lyrics on a page—reading them as poetry, listening for the emotions and inflections behind the words. His advice was simple: “You sing the song. If the take is good, you’re done.”

I sometimes imagine him in conversation with Giovanni Battista Lamperti, a 19th-century Italian teacher whose Vocal Wisdom is still read today. Sinatra says, “I speak the words first, experiment with inflections, find the emotional core before I ever sing a note.” Lamperti replies, “The voice must unite word, tone, and breath—diction, diaphragm, and focus forming an eternal triangle.” Two different traditions, but the same principle: listening first, then expression.

That kind of listening—quiet, attentive, patient—makes speech and song honest. Margaret Harshaw used to tell me that singing is 95% mental, which was her way of pointing to the same truth. Listening aligns mind and voice before a note is sung.

And it’s not just about performance. In daily life, listening is what grounds our speaking. Try this: send a short voice memo instead of a text this week. At the end of the day, listen back as if it weren’t your own voice. Notice the rise and fall, the pauses, the tone. It may feel uncomfortable, but it’s a way of letting listening guide your speaking, just as Epictetus said one faculty completes the other.

“for then my listening soul you move.” May our listening souls be moved—and from that movement, may something worth remembering be spoken.


Related Posts

If you’d like to explore related posts from earlier in this series:

Weekly Insight #6 – The Silent Saboteur: How Negative Self-Talk Undermines Your Performance https://dyavwithelias.blogspot.com/2024/09/weekly-insight-6-silent-saboteur-how.html


Weekly Insight #15 – Choosing Exercises with Purpose https://dyavwithelias.blogspot.com/2024/11/weekly-insight-15-choosing-exercises.html


Weekly Insight #22 – The Thoughtful Power of Your Voice https://dyavwithelias.blogspot.com/2025/01/weekly-insight-22-thoughtful-power-of.html


Weekly Insight #33 – Pitch, Presence, and the Power of Vocal Variation https://dyavwithelias.blogspot.com/2025/04/weekly-insight-33-pitch-presence-and.html


Weekly Insight #41 – The Quiet Power of Giving the Benefit of the Doubt https://dyavwithelias.blogspot.com/2025/05/weekly-insight-41-quiet-power-of-giving.html


Further Resources

Wikipedia: Margaret Harshaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Harshaw


Wikipedia: Giovanni Battista Lamperti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Lamperti



Elias Mokole Keynote Speaker, BA & Beyond 2025 | Voice Presence & Change Founder, Developing Your Authentic Voice Newsletter.

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