How to Listen to Music

Music has a powerful grip on our emotional brain. It can breathe new life into seemingly lifeless minds. But if there is indeed no music instinct, music—not just its creation, but also its consumption—must be an acquired skill. How, then, do we "learn" music? Even more curiously, how do we "learn" to "listen" to music, something that seems so fundamental we take it for granted? 

From the wonderful vintage book Music: Ways of Listening, originally published in 1982, comes this outline of the seven essential skills of perceptive listening, which author and composer Elliott Schwartz argues have been "dulled by our built-in twentieth-century habit of tuning out" and thus need to be actively developed. Perhaps most interestingly, you can substitute "reading" for "listening" and "writing" for "music," and the list would be just as valuable and insightful, and just as needed an antidote to the dulling of our modern modes of information consumption.

Read the rest.

(HT:  Joe Carter)