Listening and Responding to Music

Composition and creation is key to a good music education. Throughout our lives we are not always creating. Music listening and responding should be developed just as much music creation. We should develop these skills not just for fun, but it can provide a greater fulfillment in our musical development. We can learn from recordings and performances and help our skills musically. One tool we experimented with this week was Spotify. 

I mentioned this website last week in the blog. We were able to develop a playlist for our use in the classroom. I personally use Google Play Music and have created many playlists for my classroom use. This exercise was a great collaboration experience. I was able to find more music I would share with my students by looking at all the different types of playlists that others in my class created. The ease of access and incredible library that Spotify has is such an amazing resource. 

Bauer quotes Christopher Small and the word he coined, "Musicking", which Small says it is "to music. He further elaborates and says "To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composition) , or by dancing."(Small, quoted by Bauer 2014 p. 106) These things are all important in the musical development of any student. Using the available technology we can expand the library of available music for listening and responding. 

We are able to take a technology that is so often overlooked as anything except as a little fun, passive activity and turn it into a Musicking experience. We can help students move away from just hearing but into a listening mindset. We then can use technology as a tool to help develop critical thinking and active listening skills. As an educator we must help students really listen. We also need to keep in mind that students will not have a developed musical pallet and we need to help them expand their music taste. 

With our thoughts on the "other 80%" and even more who will not continue their music learning, we can help all students develop a greater method of listening for the rest of their lives. Bauer gives us some great approaches to music listening. Balance, variety, choice, repeated listening, scaffolding, developing a musical vocabulary, visual chart/map of music, movement, and sharing with discussing are the basic ideas from Bauer's approaches (Bauer 2014 p.110). These ideas can provide us as music teachers a direction for teaching students to listen rather than hear.

The next consideration of helping students listen is the perspective of listening we will use and how the technology can support those goals. Theory or aural skills, history and culture, world music, and interdisciplinary understanding are the major perspectives Bauer mentions (Bauer 2014 p. 114). There are many options to pick from for each one, and we should align it with our students needs and help them develop musical listening skills. Below are two resources to use when making some of these considerations.

Smithsonian Music Archive

Music Ace

Bauer, William I. (2014), Music Learning Today, Digital Pedagogy for Creating, Performing, and Responding to Music: New York NY, Oxford University Press