Active Listening

Listening to the assigned examples for the course should be done in conjunction with the relevant reading in the required books or assigned on-line reading. Ideally, your listening will reinforce what you have read about a piece, performer, style, etc. and vice verse. The idea is to get to know the music well enough that the concepts about it will make sense and stick with you, and so that the music to which you listen has more meaning than just a stream of sounds.

For the weekly listening quizzes I will play 2-4 excerpts for you to identify in a multiple choice format (i.e., will be allowed to see a list of the assigned pieces for the current week as you take the quiz). For the listening identification portion of the mid-term and final exams, I will narrow down the number of examples for which you will be responsible.

For the weekly assigned listening, you should listen at least three times to each piece:

1. First, listen at least once to familiarize yourself with the piece. Try to get a sense of the style, the overall flow of the piece, and some of its most distinctive characteristics (a turn of phrase, an unusual rhythm, anything that repeats a lot, etc.) Listening two or three times at this level will be even better (if, of course, time permits).

2. Listen again. Go back to the relevant reading and see if you can connect what you are hearing to what you have read about the piece (or the composer, style, etc.) If so, make a mental (better yet written) note of it. If not, where are the points of disjuncture? What did you read that you couldn’t hear in the piece, or that you heard in the piece that contradicted what you had read? All of this should help cement the piece in your memory while enhancing your understanding of the concepts and objective data about the music itself.

3. Now go back and listen a third time for what you will be able to recognize about the piece if you are asked to identify it on a listening quiz or exam. This is similar to the first time through, but now you should notice more things and be able to retain them better.

Hope this helps! For what it’s worth, here is a link to a page on writing about music that also addresses listening as conceived by the composer Aaron Copland (who we will study later this semester).