<<<<<< back to Sonata Allegro Form How to Listen to a Live Concert 1.  Prepare yourself.  You aren’t going to spend two hours in a concert hall listening to the shallow, little ditties that are played on the radio.  The better your preparation for the concert, the more rewarding the listening experience will be. 2.  Find out what the musical program is before you go.  Most orchestras publish their programs well in advance.  Get a copy and find out what they are going to play.   Unless a program focuses on a seasonal composition or celebrates one composer, it often presents three types of music.   Something from the “standard repertoire” will be played.  That includes familiar music from composers like Bach, Handle, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and others.  Something from the “light classical repertoire” will often be played.  That would include selections from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.  Composers like Tchiaikovsky, Debussy, Magorsky, Wagner, Orf and others would be heard.  Rounding out the program might be a contemporary piece from composers like Schoenberg, Glass, Cage, Ives or others.

3.  Try to listen to the music before you attend the concert.  This, along with the program guide to the concert, will help you determine the form and structure of the music you will hear.  After you hear the music once you will also be in a better position to begin forming an opinion about the content of the compositions.  Don’t think of this as cheating yourself.  The live concert is almost always better than a recording.  A CD or Mp3 recording of the music is likely to be available and it will help you get ready for the concert. 4.  Read about the composer.  Who was he (Most all of them are he’s.  But that is changing!)?  When did he live?  Where did he live?  Is anything known about his political, religious or cultural views.  Was he ultra-religious, like Bach?  Was he a stormy character, like Beethoven, who was always trying to break free of something?  Was he an intellectual like Schoenberg?  Did he write music after working all day in an insurance company, like Charles Ives?  Try to get into the composer’s style of thinking.  This will help you to form an opinion on the context of the music.

5.  Read about what the composer was trying to do with his music.  This will provide you with a sense of his concept of his own time and future as well as the traditions that made his composition possible. 6.  Once in the concert hall, read the program guide carefully and thoroughly.  Often these little booklets provide a great deal about the music and its composer.  They also contain information about the musical performers and conductor.  Now you are ready.  Sit back in your seat in the concert hall and put your mind in the composer’s time.  Let his culture, politics, religious beliefs, hopes, fears, grievances, and sense of loss inform your thoughts about his music.  Judge the music on the terms upon which he based the composition.  Let your, now rather well developed, sense of form guide you through the music.  Are the themes effective?  Did the composer develop them well?  What about orchestration?  Did it convey or muddy the message of the music?  Has the composer told a story to you?  Can you feel what Copland wrote about – that the symbolic elements of music mirror realities and provide greater esthetic pleasure than mere reality?   Where to you want to go? Glossary Time Line of Western Music Sonta Allegro Form Musical criticism applied to the folk song Down by the Salley Gardens Plato's Allegory of the Cave Terminology of Music References

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