Learning Music

Music, in all its variety, is one of our most constant companions.  It is the sound from our dashboards, iPod’s, the background to our movies, the special gift of our stereo sets,  and concert halls.  Nearly everyone responds to some kind of music.  Most of us can identify at least one performer or musical style that moves us emotionally.  Our choices today are without limit, for technology gives us instant access to more than ten centuries of music.  Most of us can readily summarize our musical tastes with a simple thought: we like what we know.

We appreciate only that music that we have come to understand.  We can follow a familiar piece of music with expectation, welcoming its main melodies, participating in its moments of climax and repose.  An unfamiliar work is not likely to affect us so strongly, for we can only guess what its unfolding melodic and rhythmic content will be.

For these reasons, one obvious way of coming to love music is through repeated exposure to specific works.  Of course, few sensual pleasures equal that of immersing oneself in an afternoon of “oldies,” be they rock, jazz, or symphonic.  But to restrict oneself to the familiar is to limit the possibilities for pleasure, and to limit them sharply.  A more adventurous way of increasing musical enjoyment is to cultivate the art of listening – the special abilities that enable a person to perceive the patterns of musical movement, the uses of musical themes, and ultimately, the creative intentions of the composer and performer.  Such abilities can heighten the enjoyment of unfamiliar works as well as familiar.  For the attentive listener, they can open entire new words of musical experience.

Music is unique as a form of expression.  Unlike traditional painting or sculpture, it is nonrepresentational.  A melody can bring to mind a seascape or the death of a loved one, but it cannot represent them in an obvious way.  In this sense, music is an art without subject matter.

Perhaps this is why music has often been said to convey pure emotion.  Music closely parallels the way in which emotions are played out in our inner lives, leaving us with feelings ambiguous in content, fluid, and strongly felt.

In that wordless state in which we think and feel, there is movement and rest, tension and release, dissonance and harmony, acceleration and retardation, intensity and dissolution.  Learning to play the piano or any instrument, one can perceive how many of these effects are created in music.  One can even come to understand why a particular musical technique creates the effect it does.  Perceptive listening can increase the level of the intellectual experience of playing music while at the same time intensify the emotional experience.
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