[shivohum]

I've been listening to classical music as a hobby for the past few
years. I still don't have a grip on how to fully appreciate a lot of
music, but I think I've grasped a significant clue over the past week.

It seems to me that one ought to listen to a piece of music as if it
were a story. Listening to a good storyteller involves a very certain sort of attention -- not too intellectual, not too aimless, not too nitpicky, but rather steady and curious, questioning and intelligent and sympathetic.

For me, listening in this way involves imagining that the music itself is describing a story, but not a concrete one -- it's a sort of
generic emotional story that has no specifics. Such a story is the act of a storyteller who wants to communicate the arc of feelings, not the arc of events (though the two may be related). It's your job as listener to follow that arc in all its intricacies, in the analogous mindset with which you would follow the arc of events in a good novel.

I've found that this mindset helps me enjoy certain music I didn't
enjoy very much before. Are there any listening strategies that you use for similar purposes?

 

[DanG]

I find that with a lot of the atonal music of the 20th Century, like the works of Schoenberg, Berg, and to a degree Bartok, it helps more to just try to "get in the mood" of the music. I guess this is what you speak of in a sense.

My favorite pieces of classical music, though, just draw me in to whatever the composer (and the performer) wants to convey. If it's a story, I'll start imagining a story; if it's a sketch (like a Debussy prelude, perhaps), I'll try to imagine the subject of the piece; and if it's one of those in-someboy's-mind pieces by Schoenberg or Berg or Bartok, the feeling will be more surrealistic. With the latter category I find that I often need to concentrate more as this type of music is generally harder for me to understand than something by Vivaldi or Brahms.

 

[Xevion]

I just like to sit back and listen, I tend to prefer large orchestral pieces like Holst's The Planets (My favorite), because they are just so powerful, but I can also enjoy music in smaller doses.

One thing you can do to enchance your classical listening "ability" is to learn some of the terms, and what they mean. Not knowing them is like being an audiophile who really knows good sound but can't describe it in the slightest.

www.bachfaq.org has a lot of information about Bach, and also a good bit of info about musical techniques (I don't know what to call them), like the fugue for example. Once you get the hang of it a bit, somtimes you can hear Bach's influence in more modern music for example, and that makes it even more interesting.

Therion has uses canon in some of their songs, one of the songs on Secret of the Runes has an interesting choral part with 2 main "voices", the main tune, and then the second iteration is the inverse offset by some time, and it just sounds mindblowing the more you think about it. You do need to listen closer then before, and instead of taking the song as a whole, or just listening to the individual insturments, but you need to pay attention to all of the main insturments concurrently to get the full effect. I would reccomend starting off with some of Bach's fugues, they can be fairly easy to follow, and just try and pay attention to the different voices and what they have to say. And if you didn't understand that one, you didn't do your homework

.

Dan - I find it quite the opposite, for some of the modern atonal music (Part for example), I don't need to think at all, I just let my imagination take over and don't think at all. I don't, however, find it nearly as stimulating as most music, although it can be interesting.

 

[PC Corp]

oh no, my history course has given me enough headache. Please don't tell me to study more. Exams are coming!!!

By the way, I mostly listen to "pop" classical music.

 

[Wes]

shivohum:

I think you are on to something--but not the only thing. My guess is that you are involved mainly in symphonic music where, I think, the storytelling idea has a lot of application. The idea of finding an emotional or, better, dramatic arc in the progression of the music works well there. It's a great conductor who can put that arc across for a Mahler symphony, for example.

Still, that's only one thing to look for. I would hold out for a very pluralistic view of approaches to music, and even the professionals seem to vary in their responses quite a bit. So why shouldn't we?

There are certainly technical things to look into and appreciate. The analogy here is to learn as much as you can--a tough proposition sometimes for us musical laymen--and then try to follow the maneuvers of the composer. The analogy here is watching a game of some sort not only to see who wins and share their feelings as the players score or bungle but to understand what makes a play work, why it's clever, or brutal, or whatever. This is obviously an open-ended process even for the professionals and a huge challenge to the laymen. I would caution that it's important not to let this approach become a source of worry. It's only one way to appreciate, and there should be no guilt or recrimination for not doing it this way (or for not always doing it, even when one can.)

Another approach is to forget story, emotion, and technique and appreciate the music as pattern, as a pleasingly proportioned or perceptually fascinating thing. Analogy? Maybe liking the pattern of a tie, taking in some scenery, savoring some food or drink, liking a certain building.

Art is a great many things, and we should resist generalizations, which have their value but can blind us to some aspects of things.

There is, by the way, a lot of interesting controversy about whether music can express emotions. That it stirs them up in the listener no one, I think, doubts. But what those emotions are vary most broadly, and the idea that the emotions of the composer or performer are conveyed with any degree of precision to the listener is very questionable. As Hanslick put it, music is all predicates. The implication is that it can't really 'say' anything specific because of that deficiency--although it can suggest almost without limit. That's not such an unusual idea really. What does a building, even the greatest, 'say'? Or the pattern of a tie?

 

[MooGoesTheCow]

Honestly, the best way to learn about classical music is to begin playing an instrument. Yup. Great feeling to hear a piece of music on the radio and say, "hey, I've played that!"

So get yourself an instrument that you've always wanted to play, and get some lessons. Guaranteed to up the enjoyment of listening to classical music. Come on... you know you want to!

 

[Wes]

Excellent point, Moo. That's one of the best ways to clamber out of the layman status so that you get familiar from the inside out with the musical bag of tricks. Then you can really see how they're used.

 

[jhoelter]

I would second MooGoesTheCow's recommendation. Playing guitar and mandolin have opened up my ears to not only the types of music I like to play but also to other types. I used to be a regular joe-blow listener - I couldn't necessarily pick out the different instruments, I listened to the "whole" sound exclusively, not able to listen to parts of the whole as well. Now I can appreciate many different styles and types of music, even if I've never heard them before.

As for classical music - I took a GREAT music course in college on Mozart and Beethoven. Before each class the teacher would talk for 5 minutes about the particular piece we were going to listen to, telling us what to listen for, what made that piece special, etc. Then once we listened to it, it was easier to relate to it, easier to appreciate it more. We also had two "projects" that semester - to write a paper about a work of each composer. For that I would get books about the piece and also the score and research the piece before and while I was listening to it. (I think I still have the papers if anyone cares to read em...on Mozart's Concerto for Piano No. 21 and Beethoven's Opus 95, String Quartet No. 11 in F minor "Serioso")

Another thing that I've been doing lately is to listen right in the beginning for a theme (sometimes more than one theme). That theme will be repeated and variated on throughout the piece - compare the first time you heard it to the last time at the end of the piece (assuming baroque/classical/romantic period music). That's something that is enjoyable to me.

Even still - I don't have any classical training, and I don't really know THAT much about some of the forms they use (sonata, fugue, etc.). Therefore, some classical music is still a little inaccessible to me. I recently got some Brahms Piano Quartets and they're almost like a different language from what I'm used to (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach). But I'm 100% sure that if I went and got a book that discussed these pieces in detail that I would enjoy them more.

Jeff

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

By the way, I mostly listen to "pop" classical music.

Is that like those "Hooked on Mozart" CDs?

j/k, couldn't resist.

 

[KR...]

LOL, is that a real CD or are you just joking?

 

[roll-man]

As someone who has listened to a truckload of classical music over the past three decades, I have found that listening to string quartets has been a wonderful way to deeply grasp this form. Structurally, a string quartet is composed identically to a symphony, with about 100 less musicians. There is something gripping and intense about a string quartet that goes straight to the core of the music. Stark yet complete. I practically prefer string quartets to a full blown symphony.

 

[MacDEF]

roll-man, in many ways I agree with you. String quartets can be quite beautiful, and they really allow you to concentrate on the contributions of a single instrument, and the ways in which the various instruments interact, more than a full symphony.

 

[PC Corp]

Quote:

roll-man, in many ways I agree with you. String quartets can be quite beautiful, and they really allow you to concentrate on the contributions of a single instrument, and the ways in which the various instruments interact, more than a full symphony

I found it's been hard to argue with MacDEF lately.

 

[stuartr]

I agree with you all about string quartets. There is something very special about them. In particular, I love Shostakovich's 8th and 15th, Beethoven's op. 131 and Ravel's, and Barber's. I think shivohum has a pretty good way of appreciating the music. Not all music is that "programmatic", but if you sort of try to immerse yourself in the music, thinking about the roles of different instruments, their interplay, and purpose, it can be really enjoyable.
If anyone is interested, I am going to attach an excerpt from my thesis. It is a description of how Shostakovich told the story of his life in his 8th quartet. I find it rather fascinating, and I hope some people here might be interested in it. I think it might shed some light on some of the different ways music can be appreciated. It also shows how different a work can sound once you know something about it. It is in plain txt now, so it might have some weird mistakes as it was in Microsoft Word format. The thesis was 80 pages, but the excerpt is about 9 pages...you can skip to the part about the quartet though, which is not quite as long. Anyway, enough talk.
Cheers,
Stuart

 

[stuartr]

I just tried to open it, and it was rather awful to try and read it...if anyone wants to read it, it might be better just to email me, and I can send the word version to them.

edit: it is fine if you read it in something other than notepad...just open it in some wordprocessor, not notepad, where it will open by default if you have windows and have not changed it.