listening & responding, i
what is listening and responding, anyway?
"Responding to music" is a bit of a funny thing to teach. I mean, one has a response to music, no matter what, even if it's "I don't get this music" or "I cannot connect to this music in any way, shape, or form" or "meh…" Responding to music is also not simply deciding whether you like a piece of music or not, though that can and sometimes should be part of a response. Responding to music is a complex activity that encompasses the following:
what is happening in the music over time;
where, when, and why the music is being performed;
your emotional and aesthetic reactions to the music;
others' emotional and aesthetic reactions to the music (for example, reception history or a review)
— all of which are context dependent, even though when we teach listening and responding, we are almost always in a context (a classroom) different from how the music was conceived to be used/be performed/take place.
In a sense, what we are teaching is a way of paying attention — to an art object, but also to oneself and the interaction between your inner life and the art object. You can see why people have emphasized (or why students often request) learning about music history instead, because regurgitating a bunch of names, dates, and piece titles is quantifiable. It's far less scary, less open-ended, less vulnerable. One of the best things I have read about this kind of attention appeared in Harvard Magazine in 2013,1 in which the art historian Jennifer Roberts details an assignment she gives her students to spend three hours with a single painting.
In all of my art history courses, graduate and undergraduate, every student is expected to write an intensive research paper based on a single work of art of their own choosing. And the first thing I ask them to do in the research process is to spend a painfully long time looking at that object. Say a student wanted to explore the work popularly known as Boy with a Squirrel, painted in Boston in 1765 by the young artist John Singleton Copley. Before doing any research in books or online, the student would first be expected to go to the Museum of Fine Arts, where it hangs, and spend three full hours looking at the painting, noting down his or her evolving observations as well as the questions and speculations that arise from those observations. The time span is explicitly designed to seem excessive. Also crucial to the exercise is the museum or archive setting, which removes the student from his or her everyday surroundings and distractions.
Now, that is a lesson in responding! However, it's challenging enough for students in early adulthood who have chosen to study art history. It's not quite something we can do with middle or high school students and not in music class. But Roberts is right that thinking about time and pacing and shaping our students' experiences is something we do need to explicitly teach:
I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?
A source that I have come to lean heavily upon in practice is the work of Lynda Barry. All of her books are worth reading, but if you only get one, Making Comics summarizes all the kinds of exercises that she leads with her classes (while they are taught at a university level, they are applicable to all ages with no adjustments) that address these exact levels of attention and pacing that Roberts writes about. For the background on how Barry arrived at these exercises and philosophy behind it, What It Is is a fantastic book.
Last year (AY 2022-2023) we did a modified version of two of Barry's exercises as listening and responding in class. This year, I'd like to continue with it, but turn it into a listening journal they do at home so that we can spend more class time talking about concepts and making music together.
After we first listen to an example, we do the first part of the exercise Barry describes on page 72 of Making Comics, but I replace the categories with "heard," "felt," "context/purpose," but I keep "question". Heard can be anything you hear in the music, not only instrumentation. Felt are feelings you have or ones that you think the music conveys. Context/purpose what you think the music might be used for, where or why people would listen to it. Question is any question you have about the piece. I have the students find answers to each others’ questions.
Then we read about a specific concept, e.g. beat. Afterwards, we do the exercise Barry outlines on page 145 of Making Comics.2 After listening to the example again, we answer specific questions relating the concept to the example.
We are teaching ways to pay attention, but we also need to support that attention with vocabulary. The students need names for what they are perceiving. Naming phenomena, of course, also affects what you are able to perceive. That said, many people respond to music with other forms of art: dance, theater, film, more music. I created a third exercise to open up space for responses that were not necessarily verbal, in which they pick a piece from a playlist and they can do a response that is in another art form. I will write more about these assignments and our composition assignments in future posts.
You can draw a spiral while listening to the piece.