Responding to Music as Listeners/Week 6

The reading this week and the lecture discussed how humans listen to music, respond to music, and how technology plays a part in music listening today.   Music listening is a skill that can be developed over time and with the use of tools.

It is pretty safe to say that the young people who are our students listen to music differently than we do.  That includes what technology they use and what they hear when they listen.  In my classes, I do music listening exercises frequently.  I have even done these in my general music classes.  I have found that students who have been in band are more critical of the music they hear, and can observe at times with their ears the different timbres.  Students in my classes listen to their music via youtube, itunes, radio, and other digital means.  The youth are not using hard copies of music for listening like older generations.  I also post have my students use google classroom for many classroom aids, but one of those are links that I post to the music we are playing.   I do think that I will also use SoundCloud this year in my classes for music listening.  I had not heard of it before reading this chapter, but after going to the site I think that it could be very useful. 

With music listening in my general music classes and beginning band classes I start very basic.  We begin by listening and with open discussion talk about what we heard or how it made us feel.  Then I move into having students write a written response reflection or reaction to the music.  The next step is to identify what they liked or disliked about the music and be able to tell me why.  As the process continues, I incorporate teaching the students about dynamics, instruments timbres, and tempo.  With listening maps they can follow classical music easier then without the maps.  It doesn’t take long before they can identify in a piece what instruments they hear, what dynamic changes, and tempos.  I find that the students are often surprised that their favorite music doesn’t offer a lot of changes and variety.  They are even more stunned with themselves that they hadn’t noticed it before.  I also have students draw dynamic charts with pieces that we listen to and this is a good way to see visually what changes occurred.

References:

Bauer, W.I. (2014). Music learning today: digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bazan, D. (2016, August 8). Responding to Music. Lecture.