listening & responding, ii
what is responding?
Listening and responding — that exact wording — is not something we talked about when I did my undergrad in music education. I first heard it from an Australian colleague when I started teaching at an international school in Germany. She felt it was sorely missing from the American-style beginning band program that my predecessor had set up. Since she was the new department head, she let me know that it should change. It's a phrase that on first hearing, of course, you know what it means. Yes, yes, of course… And then you start thinking about it… What is responding? How do I know what listeners are responding to? If you look it up on the internet, you get a lot about interpersonal communication and not a lot about music.
I turned back to myself. I mean, yes, I could have and probably should have just asked said colleague! But, you know, I was new, I was returning to teaching after some years away, I didn't want to look like a total idiot. I examined what I was really thinking when I had the initial gut reaction that, of course, I knew exactly what she was talking about. People respond by moving, dancing, making music of their own, making art, talking about it, discussing it and so on. Duh.
I also knew that people have a really hard time talking about music in clear ways. Academically schooled musicians have a common language (or at least overlapping Venn diagram) for talking about musical phenomena. Outside of classical and jazz studies at the college/university level (or say if your high school offered theory classes), it's a free for all. There's no real common language for the lay person. You make it up casually or you just don't really talk about those things. This is blatantly obvious in rock journalism, where people rarely talk about what is happening musically, and focus on what is going on socially.1 And it's true and equally problematic that classical folk putting out the bulk of academic writing on music have traditionally eschewed talking about what is going on socially.2 Thankfully, all of this is changing. There is a growing number of theorists and musicologists (and ethnomusicologists) studying rock and classical folk are doing things like reception history and the sociological aspects of classical music making, among other positive developments.
At the level I teach — middle and high school kids with a wide range of experience making music of any kind, from none to quite a bit — it's really just getting some basic concepts down. I am always a bit surprised (and not) that kids don't really know how to talk about melody and harmony, even in the sense of foreground/background or main idea/supporting idea. I focus a lot on developing vocabulary. Ultimately, the point of having the vocabulary to talk about musical phenomena is to then use that to talk about what exactly in the music we are responding to: What is causing the emotions we're having? What in the music makes us want to move our bodies in the ways that we do? What images come up and why?
Making that transfer from naming phenomena to our actual response is stubbornly difficult. Both the sounds and the responses to the sounds are very abstract and personal. People tend to default to like/dislike dichotomies. Knowing what you like is of utmost importance, of course. However, even if we were to only talk about your response in terms of like/dislike, we can have much deeper, more productive conversations about that sole aspect, if we can speak clearly about what is actually happening in the music that we like or dislike. In terms of education (leading people out beyond themselves and into the world), however, it's important to move beyond mere like/dislike when talking about anything. We need to be able to talk about what is there, whether we like it or not.
You automatically have some sort of response to music and other arts that you encounter. The goal of listening and responding is to become more aware of what that response is, what forms it can take, and to develop a language for discussing the music and your response to it. We want to:
Move beyond a knee-jerk reaction of like/dislike.
Be able to talk about what is going in the music as something separate from your likes and dislikes.
Develop aesthetic and artistic responses, i.e. "This art moves me to make more art!" or write about it or whatever.
What does it mean to have an aesthetic response? Recognizing beauty. Recognizing "drama" — the emotional content, narrative/non-narrative. What is the music "about"? What is it used for? Who is the audience?
After defining this for myself, I still saw issues. How do you elicit deeper responses? How do you evaluate a response? How do you move beyond "shopping lists" and free-associations? I've opted out of the first two questions to a large extent. The depth of a response depends on experience, maturity, and interest, as in the responder has to be actually interested in exploring and examining their response. Your mileage will always vary in any group of people, but particularly the middle and high school set. It requires a level of vulnerability that most have simply not developed yet. Evaluating that is a bit of a gut reaction on the teacher's part, it's a little I-know-it-when-I-see-it. I've come down on the side of leniency. With the third question, I've come to realize that lists and free-associations are actually an important part of the process. What I realized that I wanted to avoid were "essays" that were just a bunch of loosely culled together lists and free associations. So I don't assign essays and when students ask to do an essay instead of the (far easier!) tasks I've given them, I say no. The tasks I give them are mostly producing lists and free associations as well as art.
I talked about how I used Lynda Barry's exercises in the past in a previous post. I will write about how I modified this again this year (always tinkering…). First, I want to look at a different exercise that focuses on free associations in a different way. Philip Tagg teamed up with Bob Clarida and attempted to create an experiment to see if they could isolate what people were associating with specific music phenomena. They picked out snippets from theme songs used in TV and music — things that already had specific visual associations paired with those moments. They analyzed what was going on in the music, so they knew what the musical phenomena was. Then they played those snippets to various groups of people and asked the people to describe what might be going on in a film with that music. They analyzed the results and found that very often, people had similar images and feelings as the original pictures presented. Tagg describes the project in his book Music's Meanings, which I highly recommend.3
I attempted to recreate this experiment this year with my two groups of high school students. I created my own set of snippets that were not theme music. We only casually, superficially looked at the results. I would love to dive a bit deeper. The students found it interesting, but because our classes happen every other week and the last weekend of every month so far has been some sort of holiday, there was a bit of frustration to it as well. It was hard to connect the work over such a long period. I think also because it was harder for them to gather and compile the information,4 it stretched out the project longer than was ideal. I would do it again, however, and perhaps set up a database/Google doc for students to enter their results.
Last year, we did the Lynda Barry exercises in three installments, two during class and one as homework. This year I consolidated the exercise into one assignment with three parts all done as homework. They pick a piece from a given playlist, listen to it three times as they go through the process.
On first listening they do the exercise on p72 of Making Comics — see the video below — with the categories "heard," "felt," "saw", "reminds me of the following piece of music."
The last two in particular are inspired by the Tagg-Clarida experiment, in which "saw" is describing loosely "if this music were for a scene in a movie/tv show, what is going on" and "reminds me of" is Tagg & Clarida's way of connecting similar musical phenomena. Again, it would be even better if we could compile all of this information, and maybe in the future I will find an efficient way of doing this that does not elicit groans from my students. Instead of doing each category in separate timings, this year I decided it would be better to take the full five minutes and write as things occurred to you and just put them in the correct boxes. Then, you do a second listening later and fill in more information. Now, is there any way I can guarantee that the students are actually doing this on separate occasions? No. No, there is not. I am simply presenting a way of working and it's not worth anyone's energy for me to police it. You get out of it what you put in.
On the third listening, they do the X-page part described on pages 144-6 in Making Comics, in which they answer the questions based around what they wrote in the "saw" box. Then they draw it up and write a first-person narrative of the scene, a combination of page 146 and page 73. You can also look at these videos:
Making the X page:
Timing the drawing and write up:
The results have been much better than what I got in class last year and I do think it's partly because they can do it on their own and space out the listenings. I do miss some of the theatrical and film things that the students produced as responses last year, but there were also many half-assed, last minute, thrown together things, too.
We also have compositions that focus on the terminology we learn, but I will save that discussion for a future post.
Ethnomusicology is its own island. Classical and jazz folk do not learn what "ethno" folks do unless they specifically take an ethno methodology class.
For more, see my dissertation, but tl;dr — So, so, so many sources would say things along the lines of 'superficial political agendas distract from the real important thing, which is THE MUSIC' as if they were separate and unrelated — and particularly when the composer himself felt they were inseparable.
This is also the topic of Ten Little Title Tunes which goes over the experiment more explicitly; Music's Meanings is a discussion of the experiment's implications for music pedagogy.
They are, as a rule, simply not as focused as college students in a class of their own choosing, which is not surprising.