zwWolverines: ZIMBOMUSIC

Album Review: TAKURA - (SomeoneHadToDoIT) SHTDi

April 30, 2018Panashe Gomendo

download events music

Nutty O and songstress Tamy Moyo set to release a single track

April 18, 2018Panashe Gomendo

Hiphop LIfestyle music

WATCH Takura - SHTDi (Official Documentary) and GET INSPIRED

April 11, 2018Panashe Gomendo

dancehall featuring video

WATCH: Buffalo Souljah breathtaking video with Kinnah - "GWENYA"

December 31, 2017Panashe Gomendo

8L afro-pop Hiphop

DOWNLOAD: TOMBOFARA -- 8L ft PahChihera and Lipsy!!!!

December 08, 2017Panashe Gomendo

afro-pop music zim-dancehall

Listen to killer T's latest single "Mudiwa Wangu"

November 20, 2017Panashe Gomendo

afro-pop Hiphop music

LISTEN/DOWNLOAD EX-Q: TSAGA OF THE YEAR

November 20, 2017Panashe Gomendo

music news zimbabwe

SEH CALAZ's New Album is here!

November 10, 2017Panashe Gomendo

books culture how to

HOW TO LISTEN TO MUSIC (Panashe Gomendo)

November 09, 2017Panashe Gomendo

Music has a powerful grip on our emotional brain. It can breathe new life into seemingly lifeless minds. But if there is indeed no music instinct, music — not just its creation, but also its consumption — must be an acquired skill. How, then, do we “learn” music beyond merely understanding how it works? How do we “learn” to “listen” to music, something that seems so fundamental we take it for granted?

From the wonderful vintage book Music: Ways of Listening, originally published in 1982, comes this outline of the seven essential skills of perceptive listening, which author and composer Elliott Schwartz argues have been “dulled by our built-in twentieth-century habit of tuning out” and thus need to be actively developed. Perhaps most interestingly, you can substitute “reading” for “listening” and “writing” for “music,” and the list would be just as valuable and insightful, and just as needed an antidote to the dulling of our modern modes of information consumption.

Develop your sensitivity to music. Try to respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet. When we really hear sounds, we may find them all quite expressive, magical and even ‘beautiful.’ On a more complex level, try to relate sounds to each other in patterns: the successive notes in a melody, or the interrelationships between an ice cream truck jingle and nearby children’s games.

Time is a crucial component of the musical experience. Develop a sense of time as it passes: duration, motion, and the placement of events within a time frame. How long is thirty seconds, for example? A given duration of clock-time will feel very different if contexts of activity and motion are changed.

Develop a musical memory. While listening to a piece, try to recall familiar patterns, relating new events to past ones and placing them all within a durational frame. This facility may take a while to grow, but it eventually will. And once you discover that you can use your memory in this way, just as people discover that they really can swim or ski or ride a bicycle, life will never be the same.

If we want to read, write or talk about music, we must acquire a working vocabulary. Music is basically a nonverbal art, and its unique events and effects are often too elusive for everyday words; we need special words to describe them, however inadequately.

Try to develop musical concentration, especially when listening to lengthy pieces. Composers and performers learn how to fill different time-frames in appropriate ways, using certain gestures and patterns for long works and others for brief ones. The listener must also learn to adjust to varying durations. It may be easy to concentrate on a selection lasting a few minutes, but virtually impossible to maintain attention when confronted with a half-hour Beethoven symphony , Mbira or a three-hour Verdi opera.

Composers are well aware of this problem. They provide so many musical landmarks and guidelines during the course of a long piece that, even if listening ‘focus’ wanders, you can tell where you are.

Try to listen objectively and dispassionately. Concentrate upon ‘what’s there,’ and not what you hope or wish would be there. At the early stages of directed listening, when a working vocabulary for music is being introduced, it is important that you respond using that vocabulary as often as possible. In this way you can relate and compare pieces that present different styles, cultures and centuries. Try to focus upon ‘what’s there,’ in an objective sense, and don’t be dismayed if a limited vocabulary restricts your earliest responses.

[…]

Bring experience and knowledge to the listening situation. That includes not only your concentration and growing vocabulary, but information about the music itself: its composer, history and social context. Such knowledge makes the experience of listening that much more enjoyable.

There may appear to be a conflict between this suggestion and the previous one, in which listeners were urged to focus just on ‘what’s there.’ Ideally, it would be fascinating to hear a new piece of music with fresh expectations and truly innocent ears, as though we were Martians. But such objectivity doesn’t exist. All listeners approach a new piece with ears that have been ‘trained’ by prejudices, personal experiences and memories. Some of these may get in the way of listening to music. Try to replace these with other items that might help focus upon the work, rather than individual feelings. Of course, the ‘work’ is much more than the sounds heard at any one sitting in a concert hall; it also consists of previous performances, recorded performances, the written notes on manuscript paper, and all the memories, reviews and critiques of these written notes and performances, ad infinitum. In acquiring information about any of these factors, we are simply broadening our total awareness of the work itself.

Music: Ways of Listening is a book explaining how we can improve our listening capacity and what Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book brings out is all to do with reading — a timeless, yet remarkably timely meditation of a skill-intensive art we all, too frequently mistake it for a talent or, worse yet, a static pre-wired capacity.

The next article on Music is basically going to be focused on how music, with different genres and type of music, affects our day to day lives. I will even talk about how we can best benefit from music...

at the mean time take your time and enjoy the latest music and download for free on this blog.

Please leave a comment: