INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR MUSIC EDUCATION

This paper was presented at the 1998 Seminar

"The Musician in New and Changing Contexts"

organized by the ISME Commission "Education of the Professional Musician"

in Harare, Zimbabwe,

and at a special Commission session at the 1998 ISME Conference, Pretoria, South Africa

 

LEARNING TO LISTEN 

by María del Carmen Aguilar

ABSTRACT

Within the frame of the recommendations of the Advisory Panel on Musics of the World's Cultures (1994) and the discussions and conclusions of the last Seminar of this Commission (Malmö, 1996), this paper presents a proposal for the teaching of Music Analysis, which can help the professional musician to become aware that his or her practice is inserted in a cultural context, and therefore, to establish a more fluent connection with the music of other cultures.

 

Background

In 1994, after four years' work, the ISME Advisory Panel on Music of the World's Cultures, chaired by Bruno Nettl and of which I am honoured to have been a member, issued a document entitled Policy on Music of the World's Cultures , a series of recommendations aimed at centering the efforts of the ISME on a wider and better comprehension of the musical and cultural diversity and at incorporating that diversity into music education. This document was the basis of the work of the last Seminar of this Commission as may be concluded from a couple of paragraphs of the final report :

While in the past Western culture assumed a dominating role in many societies, a growing awareness of the genuine value of all cultures and their musics is emerging world-wide. Any discussion of music education should be based upon the principles that all cultures contain music, that music as a means of communication can only be understood and assessed in a cultural context, that every music has value to those who see it as part of their culture, and that that valuation should incur our respect.

.... It is a challenge to educational systems to contribute to the re-establishment of people's and society's ownership of music through a greater awareness of how musicians interact with their audiences in various cultures, jobs and situations.

Within the frame of these recommendations this paper presents a proposal for the teaching of Music Analysis, which can help the professional musician to become aware that his or her practice is inserted in a cultural context, and therefore, to establish a more fluent connection with the music of other cultures.

 

Speech and languages

Each culture and social group has a peculiar way of understanding and practising music. Therefore, the study of the cultural context should accompany any contact with musics alien to the habitual experience. But, in order that this contact should prove fruitful, it is not enough to deal with historical and social considerations: the musician also needs to rely on adequate technical tools.

As from the early stages of the musician's education, the practice of music analysis can help , if it is oriented from a universalistic point of view, taking into account that any music style combines certain essential elements of music in a specific way.

It is necessary first to establish a distinction between "music" - i.e. one of the means of expression of the human being, comparable with the capability of developing speech - and "music styles" - i.e. the different ways each culture puts this into practice, in the same way as the different languages are brought about by the capability of speech.

Music articulates sounds in time. It selects certain sounds by pitch and timbre qualities and organizes them rhythmically. Taking this idea as a starting point, it is necessary to put some questions that can help to define in which way each culture or music style deals with this phenomenon. The most general questions somehow involve the concept of time that each culture has:

- Within a certain given style, is it the musician's purpose to make the listener aware of a time process or rather is there an attempt to nullify the perception of time?

- Is the listener's complicity sought for by alluring him with a changing development of sound events or is there an intention of concentrating his attention on a reduced amount of reiterated information?

The answer to these questions allows us to comprehend the essence of quite different music styles, from discursive styles, that mean to articulate time by proposing time processes of conflict/resolution, to musics in which the objective is to generate a hypnotic state, by means of the constant repetition of the same stimuli.

In the first case, the music constructs a form in time by communicating the steps or stages of its development. It unfolds a thematic idea and elaborates on it -with or without transition towards other ideas- and announces clearly the end of the process. The listener accompanies the stages of this construction with his active attention. In the second case, the non-evolution of the process will be the prevailing characteristic. The listener understands that he needn't expect variety or conflict and turns off his conscious attention.

The analysis of each style requires the consideration of more questions, regarding aspects more and more detailed. For example:

- Is it the musician's intention to communicate the development of thematic ideas, i.e. specific melodic or rhythmic structures? Do these structures articulate with each other in some kind of syntax? Are these thematic ideas subject to a process of elaboration or are they just reiterated unchanged? At this level of analysis the characteristics of the different types of formal construction mentioned above may be better comprehended.

- How is the rhythmic organization conceived , i.e. the relationship between the entries of sounds? Do the music follow the natural cadence of the words? Do sounds turn up at regular intervals? Is there some kind of proportionality that leads to the listening of the pulse? Does that pulse sound like accompaniment? Are the entries of sounds masked in their timbre? Each one of these alternatives and their simultaneous or successive combinations brings about a specific type of physical experience to the listener which means the basis for his contact with music.

- How do music and words relate to each other? This analysis reveals the attitude of each culture regarding the relative hierarchy between words and music: preeminence of word over music, ritual words of obscure or forgotten meaning, improvised lyrics, recitation, singing, etc.

- Is the simultaneousness of sound events at all considered? If so, how do they interact hierarchically? At this level of analysis are studied the different textures (accompanied melody, polyphony, homophony, etc.) and their importance in the definition of style.

- Which timbres are selected? Voices and instruments, natural or electronic sounds and their countless combinations, will point out what each culture or music style considers appropriate for being taken out of the daily context and given artistic, ritual, religious, fun, etc. meaning.

 

The musician's education and the music of his culture

Since the start of his education, the musician should learn to listen to the music of his own culture in the way mentioned above. Through the aural discrimination of the elements that make it up, and the understanding of the relationship between these elements, he'll become aware of the special way in which his culture plays with the basic elements of music.

A definition of professional musician arrived at during the 1996 Seminar of this Commission points to " performing musicians who, by nature of their profession, have a responsibility to their musical culture as well as to those with whom they interact as performers and teachers" . Taking this into account, we may say that the musician is responsible for and should be aware of the cultural patterns which rule what he does. By setting his music in context as a cultural production he can, not only understand that his culture combines the music elements in a specific way, but also that this way is not the only possible one. By being more open and tolerant of other cultural patterns he will in turn be able to help those he works with, and very especially the children, to understand, accept and celebrate the differences.(Vive la differérence!)

 

Case study

According to the above mentioned ideas I have worked for the past ten years at the University of Buenos Aires teaching hundreds of students - Fine Arts, Performing Arts as well as Music students- to listen to music. Therefore, I have organized a group of teachers who are professional musicians (piano, guitar and clarinet players, singers, composers and choir and band conductors) who agreed to revise in depth the concepts which they were taught, and thus acquire a different way of focusing on music analysis.

 

The work with students

The work with the students starts by making them aware of the great amount of capabilities and ideas they have unconsciously learnt from their culture. They are guided in the observation of their own perceptions, thus transforming the first global and synthetic approach to the music in question into partial observations of each element. The material is organized in order to make the most of the students' auditive experience, starting by music styles familiar to them. Then they are invited to open up this experience and listen to music of different styles, observing the similarities and differences that each one shows in the treatment of the music elements.

Rock and pop music is the most familiar to students. Therefore, the work is done taking into account the skills they have developed in contact with it:

- they can tell the difference between rap (speech which follows a certain rhythmic pattern) and normal speech (free rhythm) and they can extend this perception and distinguish between free and pulsated rhythms, both sung and/or instrumental;

- they can recognize the pulse in popular music accompanied by percussion and can extend this skill to pulsated music without any percussive accompaniment;

- on the basis of pulse they are able to comprehend the concept of metric accent and "see" how the musical phrases are structured around these accents;

- they can remember and hum the most significant phrases in a music piece and therefore comprehend how it is structured around one or more themes, and how these themes develop from rhythmic-melodic motives;

- they recognize aurally the feeling of repose brought about by the arrival at the tonal centre and the tension created by not reaching it, and can fine-tune their perception to distinguish the music not organized round a tonal centre as well as the different tonal organizations in which the functions of repose and tension are blurred on account of dissonances;

- they can focus on recognizing aurally instruments and types of voices in the music they listen to habitually and enhance their capabilities of discriminating other timbres;

- they can recognize the hierarchic relationship between melody and accompaniment and extend this perception to the acknowledgment of other textures.

During the audition, each listener focuses on certain aspects rather than on others and constructs a Gestalt which allows him a certain comprehension of the object studied. Given that music flows in time, this Gestalt relies mainly on the memorizing capability of the listener. To add to this memorizing, each element perceived is annotated my means of carefully worked out graphic representations. In this way, the time articulation of these elements and their relationship with each other may be observed, thus achieving a synthetic vision which somehow reconstructs the initial global perception.

We work in groups, heeding the students' individual perception, and ask them to share it with the others' , i.e. to recognize the value of the Gestalt which each one of them has come up with in order to comprehend the object of study, as well as to see this Gestalt as a temporary means of knowledge, still apt to be enriched by further information.

The students come up with interesting insights on the particular way everybody views reality, develop a strong interest in listening to music of different styles and cultures, and recognize they have acquired an analytic tool that allows them both to comprehend in depth and to undo prejudice.

Once they had experienced this way of teaching music audition in the university, the teachers adapted it to primary and secondary schools, schools of popular music, conservatories, film-making schools (music in film) and in-service training courses for music teachers. Similar reactions, though not quite the same, were observed in each area:

- children and teenagers on one hand strengthen their musical likes taking pride in technical elements to sustain them and on the other become more open to other music styles;

- students of popular music find it useful to have a tool which allows them to distinguish styles and to concentrate on the acquiring the necessary technique to reproduce them. At the same time, they come to understand that the styles they nor indulge in are as worthy of respect as the one or ones they do like.

- Conservatory students find within this analytical approach useful information to help them make interpretation decisions in each different style. Also, they develop and interest in looking for and finding these features in different non-classical music;

- film making students learn to relate the time process of music with the development of the film. On comparing the musical syntax with the structure of montage they discover that in many cases, it is owing to the music that a certain film syntax become clear. This allows them to have a clearer idea of the kind of music needed for each scene and to set aside whatever biased concepts and conventions they might have fallen for.

 

The teacher's work

In order to carry out this work, all of the teachers involved -the university teachers as well as those to whom the in-service training courses were given- experienced a deep transformation. They started to accept that questioning not only their own perceptions but also the theoretical basis they used to explain them is natural and may be highly profitable. They discovered that, because they have been educated as musicians within the frame of one music style, they have taken too many things for granted, without any thought that this theoretical corpus is but one more Gestalt, itself suffering from strong influences of cultural and stylistic patterns. This has led the participants on the whole to a certain humbleness inasmuch as they find that they are members of a culture which can consider the other's point of view and become enriched in this way.