No abstract
Somewhere there must be music appreciation classes who know Mozart and Bart6k from years of going to concerts and listening to records. I sometimes wish I could teach them, for my students are of a different kind. Mine have usually heard high school bands, at least on the football field, and they may have heard the name Beethoven, but rarely has any of them ever heard a symphony or a concerto.When I first taught one of these classes several years ago, I was overwhelmed by how much there was to teach them and by how much music they hadn't yet heard and probably would never hear, at least not in live performance. I had conceived of the course as an opportunity to discuss the mysteries of style and the evolution of forms and genres; I wanted to prepare my students for concert-going and for the intelligent discussion of what they would hear. These goals are laudable, but they assume what I soon found out my students do not possess-a background of significant musical experience.What constitutes musical experience and how it is acquired offers the possibility of almost endless speculation, but no matter what direction the speculation takes, it begins with the premise that the experience itself is important. The importance is based on the assumption that each musical (or any kind of aesthetic) experience changes whoever knows that experience. I can express very little about the nature of the change except to say that when it occurs, at least in me, it somehow deepens self-knowledge in a way nothing else can and increases the ability to feel and to know what others feel. Music turns me on, and for me this is the first important thing about it. Whatever I enjoy about music, whatever I know about music, and whatever I want to learn about music rests on this foundation. Just as aesthetic judgments and criticism proceed from the initial response of "I like it" or "I don't like it," so the most significant learning about music must certainly begin with the aesthetic experience.Learning on cognitive and emotional, or feeling, levels may very often be independent of each other. I can easily imagine someone dutifully learning about Schoenberg without confronting his music, but I cannot imagine that this learning would have any lasting significance, probably because it seems so sterile.The problem is how I can get my students to respond to music, how I can get them to experience it deeply. After this, all the rest-the information I want them to have, the concepts I want them to develop-is not only easy but significant to the point that they can find joy in the learning.Obviously, students must listen to music in order to experience it, and most students need something to listen for. I can ask them to listen in order to determine something about the music-mode, meter, instrumentation, or even form. At the same time, however, I find myself involved with the music in temporal progression, listening to musical events as they happen and hoping to hear the relationships between them. Why, for instance, does the beginning of the piece s...
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