Listening For Music

Two things are true about your next twenty-four hours of life.  You will inhale four or five hundred quarts of air and hear a lot of music.  Much of the music will be forced upon you through commercials, movies, TV shows and public space music.  Some you will choose from a personal CD or Ipod collection.  Most of the music you hear will pass without making an impression on you.  A tiny bit of it will provide you with rewarding, sometimes overpowering, experiences. 

This small collection of notes is intended to help you understand that overpowering musical experience and provide the structure by which you can seek to replicate it.  The first step is to abandon the notion that you “listen TO music”.   That overpowering experience comes from active listening in which you “listen FOR music”.

The Fundamental Goal of Music
All music, no matter what its type, purpose, country of origin, or its time period has, as its fundamental goal, the creation and relief of tension. 

Deconstructing Music
Compsers, conductors, arrangers and performers of music have five basic tools:  rhythm, melody, harmony, tonal color and form.  “Listening FOR music” requires an ability to identify each of these tools and think of them both separately and together, or as musicians say “in ensemble.”  An active listener is analytical, careful, thoughtful, reflective, critical and engaged with the totality of the music.  Great music is always more than the sum of its individual parts.  But, you cannot appreciate that sum until you can identify and understand the four basic parts.  Once you have trained your ear to identify these components, careful listening will allow you to flow through different layers of music and appreciate its complexity.  As you reassemble these components of music, you will begin to recognize how voices work together to create polyphony. 
 

On to Rhythm >>>>>>>>>>>>>