Start with your ears

In our busy world, how do we learn to really focus on the music all around us? Should we listen for the beat, the melody, or the harmony? What is most important? Well, the answer of course is—all of them! In this unit, we will learn how to sharpen our listening skills in order to hear the details of music. Doing so will help us to begin thinking about music in a new way.

​Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven struggled with hearing loss throughout his life. In 1816, the German composer lost his hearing completely but continued to write music by feeling the frequencies of the notes on the piano sounding board. Despite this, he composed his most famous work in 1824—completely deaf. If you have heard or sung the song “Ode to Joy,” you have experienced a piece of this most famous Ninth Symphony

Lesson 2 - Hearing or Listening

So, what makes a sound something worth listening to rather than just something you hear as background noise? Well, that is up to you to decide! We all have our own preferences for the sounds that we like to hear—remember, even before birth we move toward sounds we like and turn away from those we don’t.

So, when we hear a sound that makes our ears “perk up,” we need to sharpen our listening skills. This is called active listening, and it is a skill that we must practice in order to make it a habit. Active listening means listening with complete attention, and it is a term that comes from psychology. It can be used when we are in a conversation with a friend or family member, or when listening to music.

​So what does active listening to you? Let's look at the examples.

Listening checklist

The first items on our musical checklist will be – you guessed it – our musical elements: rhythm, pitch, melody, harmony, scales, intervals and chords! To this list of musical elements, we will add just a few more things, called expressive elements, for our completed listening checklist: dynamics, articulation, tempo, and form. For each item on our list, we will learn to answer some specific questions.This can be printed off or saved - shown in Lesson 2, Unit 3. Let's look at this.

You might notice that some of the words in our checklist are in a different language. The words in italics come from the Italian language. Why Italian instead of English, French, or Chinese? Well, for a long time, musicians memorized their music and taught it to others by rote (or repetition). But, in the 1500s, musicians started to print their music so that others could learn and perform it without being taught by the composer. A lot of these musicians happened to be from Italy, and their music was distributed all over Europe, with its Italian musical terms. Can you think of a reason why we keep using these Italian terms today? Well, what’s great about music is that it brings together people from all nations, races, and religions. When we gather diverse groups of people together, it helps to have a common language to work with, and for music, Italian is often used!

This week:

Do you have the five assignments from Units 1 and 2 done? Nothing to do yet in Unit 3.

Do you need to meet with me? Why or why not are you all caught up?