LECTURE 1: What Does It Take to Know Music?

What Does It Take to Know Music? Listen, Just Listen!

If I were to rank all the materials in the course, music itself (not words about music) tops the list. Why? Without music, there really isn't much point in talking about it.

Also, one of the objectives of the entire course is to develop advanced listening skills. The listening examples that you encounter in each module are designed to help achieve this goal. Listen to the examples more than once. Forget about multi-tasking and go old school for a minute. Focus only on what you are hearing. Avoid dividing your attention among other tasks or activities.

When you listen to the music examples, think of this activity as a listening session and assign yourself enough time to complete it in a relaxed manner. I suggest you listen to the music example first, without any goals or objectives in mind. That's normal at any level, pros and amateurs alike. Then listen again for whatever the assignment specifically asks you to focus upon. In this way, throughout the course, you will learn how to listen for specific things in music, and that is an important step in appreciating and understanding music.

A Musician's Insight: Musician's train their "ears" throughout their career by careful listening to music. The better musicians arrive at a point where they use their "intuitive ear," (a rather unscientific term) rather than the conscious parts of the brain, to decide on whether or not a passage or musical idea sounds good, even though these may break the traditional rules of music. When a musician can rely successfully on that intuitive ear, he or she has stepped up to a new plateau in one's musical journey. Sometimes the best way to approach composing is not to think in terms of what will satisfy the popular audience, but what sounds good to one's ear. Sometimes, that is the difference between art vs. entertainment.