Discover how to listen to music

"MUSIC" means something different to just about everyone. In the 21st century, though, most of the time when someone mentions 'music', an image comes to mind usually of a revealing skin tight outfit or baggy pants coupled with glaring lights, smoke, video screens and large cheering crowds. Usually.

But that's marketing. Music is only a small and tiny portion of that mental imagery, and certainly isn't the inspiration of the image, let alone the inspiration of the product we're looking to buy. No, these days we buy a person, or an idol. Music has little to do with the money spinners these days, and that has its blessings and its curses.

Fortunately, it wasn't always like that, but I wonder how much our warped and brain-washed minds can still cope with the original effects and demands that 'music' created. Only very recently did music fall by the wayside under the influence of consumerism. Only very recently did music become something to be ignored while our attention is focused elsewhere. Only very recently did music no longer inspire or entertain. Now, it's the marketing folk who do all of the above, and we call it music.

Take, for example, an orchestra. At first it was a small collection of instrumentalists who provided something for us to dance to. Not much different to 'music' today, you might say. But then it grew both in size and demand of the players, and orchestras began to be used in church services and as a form of entertainment in its own right. In the 1700s, people could sit and focus their attention on an orchestra and understand what was going on. Can you believe that? I'm sure there were some snoring head-nodders, too, but all in all, hearing what the orchestra was playing, delighting in what was coming next, and getting a thrill out of surprising musical twists and turns was common. Very common.

The problem nowadays? Time and effort. Not that we don't have the time, or the effort. But we've become lazy. Very lazy. We don't want to take the time - anything that requires more than 3 minutes of our attention is too hard. Anything that makes me think, or focus my energy, is too hard. Sports teams are getting worse. Math & English skills are plummeting. Science is being taken over by computers. Why? Because the vast majority of the public has been brought up in an environment that gives them everything - gives us images, sounds, noises, gives us the answers, makes the goal posts bigger, or the water easier to float in (heaven forbid we actually SWIM in our backyard pools!!). Of course I'm over-generalizing, but sometimes one has to in order to make the point.

There's good news: It's exciting to listen to music, and not that hard.

1. Pay attention to one little snippet - a phrase, loud or soft, fast or slow, deep or high.

2. Listen throughout the song or piece and try to figure out how many times that snippet reappears - exactly the same, upside down, backwards, etc.

3. Play the song or piece again and give a different snippet your attention and do the same thing.

4. Then, figure how if and how the snippets are related or interchagned!

5. Lastly, it's best to have a good teacher. Try George Marriner Maull, Artistic Director of the Discovery Orchestra - their concerts do exactly that... teach you how to listen!