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10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.4.1 - How to Listen to Music

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Applied Humanities

Learning to Hear How to Listen to Music By Alisha Nypaver 1 Module One: Introduction to the Humanities / Page 1.4.1 How to Listen to Music On this page: 0 of 5 attempted (0%) | 0 of 1 correct (0%) Objective: Identify strategies for analyzing music.

This is a black-and-white photograph of jazz musician Miles Davis playing the trumpet. He is turned toward, and playing into, a microphone.

Miles Davis performing in Paris, France, 1964.

Herve Glaoguen/Getty Images

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. —Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

Take some time to think about how often you hear music. Do you hear it in your car? At work? While studying? You might encounter it at the movies and at the grocery store, or maybe through advertising jingles and your phone’s ringtone. We hear music all around us, but how often do we listen to music?

POLL QUESTION

How much music do you think you hear on an average day?

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Hearing music is passive; listening to music is active. Active listening requires you to pay attention to the sounds you hear on a deeper level. It can help you achieve a better understanding of what music means and enable you to evaluate a piece of music in a way that is not possible using only passive hearing.

Strategies for Analyzing Music

On this page, you will learn some basic strategies to use when studying musical works.

To listen to music like a pro, you’ll want to adopt these basic strategies:

1. Contextual Listening 2. Analytic Listening 3. Performance Elements

Unlike a painting, which you can look at for as long as necessary to understand and analyze it, music is a linear progression through time. Therefore, to analyze and understand a piece of music, you need to listen to it multiple times while using careful, focused listening to help you dig deeper into the work.

There are two levels of deeper listening: contextual listening and analytic listening.

1. Contextual Listening

Music is not created in a vacuum. Rather, it is very much a product of the cultural and historical environment in which it was created. Contextualized listening invites the listener to gather information about the genesis of the work and view it in light of that information. Doing this can deepen your understanding, illuminate why the composer used the chosen musical tools to create the sounds you are hearing, and alter your perception of the piece.

less than an hour

one to five hours

six to ten hours

more than ten hours

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To do contextualized listening, some fact-finding is necessary. A good way to start is by exploring a piece’s compositional, cultural, and historical contexts while searching for the answers to the questions below.

Compositional Context

Who composed this work? Why did the composer write this work? Is the music meant to tell a story? If so, how does knowing the story influence your interpretation of the music? If the piece has lyrics, how do the lyrics and music work together to exert an emotional impact?

Cultural Context

How does this work reflect the society in which it was written? How was the piece shaped by the standards and technological limitations of its time and place? What was the impact of this piece at the time it was written?

Historical Context

Does this piece reflect a more general artistic movement? If so, which one, and how? Why has this piece withstood the test of time? Was this piece fairly conventional for its time, or did it push boundaries? Is this piece still relevant today? If so, how and why?

2. Analytic Listening

Try this: play a song you really like right now. As you listen to the song, write down what it is about the song that you like. If the song has lyrics, perhaps they influence your opinion of the song, but what else attracts you? Try to pinpoint exactly which elements appeal to you and describe them as precisely as you can.

Response Board What song did you choose, and what specifically do you like about it?

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Now listen to a song that you strongly dislike. What is different about this song that causes you to dislike it? Again, try to be as specific as you can when describing what bothers you about the song (looking beyond the content of the lyrics).

Response Board What song did you choose, and what specifically do you dislike about it?

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What you may have noticed about this exercise is that it can be quite difficult to write about music without having the necessary vocabulary to identify the elements of the music. Part of being able to listen on a deeper level requires knowledge of some basic terminology that defines the fundamental elements of music.

Knowing how to describe musical elements can help you analyze the way music is constructed. These six basic characteristics will get you started:

1. Timbre 2. Texture 3. Pitch 4. Rhythm 5. Dynamics 6. Form

Timbre

This element of music describes the distinctive quality of a particular instrument or voice. Timbre (pronounced “TAM-burr”) is how you can tell the difference between a guitar and a piano, or identify the voice of your mother versus that of your sister over the phone.

Texture

Texture refers to the layers of musical sound. Most music has more than one layer. Texture involves how many layers there are and how those layers are functioning. Not every instrument or voice you hear is necessarily its own layer. For example, the popular punk rock band Green Day currently has four members: a vocalist/guitarist (Billie Joe Armstrong), a second guitarist (Jason White), a bassist (Mike Dirnt), and a drummer (Tré Cool). In a typical Green Day song, Armstrong provides the melody with his voice, which is the layer that most clearly draws our ears. Armstrong, Dirnt, and

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White all play the harmony on their instruments, a second layer that supports but does not distract from the melody. The drums (and to a certain extent, the bass) provide an additional layer, the rhythm, that creates energy and drive.

Pitch

Pitch refers to the relative “highness” or “lowness” of a musical sound. Some singers, like Adam Levine, have a relatively high pitch range, while others, like Barry White, have a much lower pitch range. Understanding pitch helps when describing layers of music. Melody is a series of pitches arranged in a linear fashion, one after the other, whereas harmony is a series of pitches that occur simultaneously.

Rhythm

Rhythm has two meanings in music. At its most basic level, it refers to the relative duration of a pitch. Therefore, all musical sounds have rhythm because they all exist in time. In the vernacular use of the term, rhythm more commonly refers to a rhythmic pattern. Often the simplest rhythmic patterns are the most memorable. For instance, the beginning of “We Will Rock You” by Queen features an instantly recognizable rhythmic pattern: stomp-stomp-clap.

In the context of the first definition of the term, the “clap” sound is held for twice the duration of the “stomps.” If you clap and stomp along with the music, try doing two stomps on the final clap to have a clearer understanding of the 2:1 rhythmic ratio. The stomps are twice as fast as the clap.

Dynamics

This term refers to the relative “loudness” or “softness” of a musical sound. Most modern recorded music does not have significant differences in dynamic levels within a song, because producers have edited the recording to balance the amplitude, largely so that you don’t have to keep adjusting the volume on your radio or headphones. In sheet music, however, sounds to be played loudly are indicated with the letter f (which stands for forte, the Italian word for “strong”), and sounds to be played quietly are indicated with the letter p (which stands for piano, the Italian word for “soft”).

Form

In music, form refers to how the musical sections are organized. A lot of popular music has several sections that might repeat throughout the song (such as the verses and the

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chorus), and many also have a contrasting section called a bridge.

Knowing these terms can help you recognize and articulate the characteristics of a piece of music that cause you to like or dislike it. This understanding can also help you recognize how composers use music to evoke specific emotions and ideas. Most importantly, musical analysis can help you understand what makes a piece of music “great.” Skilled composers who found innovative ways of utilizing these musical elements have crafted masterworks that have not only withstood the test of time, but also helped to shape the trajectory of music history.

Multiple-Choice Question

Which musical characteristic enables you to tell a violin from a piano, even if they are playing the exact same note?

timbre dynamics texture form

3. Performance Elements

Unlike the music of today, which can exist in a definitive version through recording technology, music from hundreds of years ago has survived only in written form and requires performers to bring it to life. This adds another factor for our consideration: the performance. Rigorous analysis of a musical performance can raise various questions.

Are the performers skilled? An unskilled musician can certainly have a strong impact on the audience’s perception. However, it is important to remember that even a skilled musician can have an “off” night or make mistakes. For proof, consider this example: Mariah Carey’s recorded version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is very different from her live Rockefeller Center misadventure in 2014. In the 2014 live performance, Carey has a series of embarrassing vocal mistakes, including out-of-tune notes and vocal breaks.

How does the performer’s interpretation of the written work affect the performance? The same piece of written music can sound very different when performed by different musicians. For this reason, listening to multiple recordings of the same work can provide a more complete understanding of the composition. As an

10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.4.1 - How to Listen to Music

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example, let’s discuss Arthur Rubenstein’s performance of a Chopin piano prelude with Aldona Dvarionaite’s performance. Both pianists are reading the same printed notes as they were written by Chopin, but subtle differences in rhythm, emphasis, and dynamics make for a dramatic contrast between the two. Rubenstein’s performance is much faster, and somewhat choppier than Dvarionaite’s, which is more than 50 percent slower and features a much more drawn out and dramatic climax than Rubenstein’s.

Response Board What is another possible question you could consider to help you analyze music?

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