Learning to Listen to Music

I am trying to spend one hour a week listening to music. This is harder than it seems. We listen to music all the time, in our cars, at the office, on transit and in our homes, with IPods and other devices it’s hard to keep music at bay sometimes. But what I am trying to do is actually spend an entire hour just sitting and listening to music. This is hard, we don’t really listen to music anymore, it’s so accessible and so everywhere that it is easy to let music fade into the background.

I try and imagine sometimes what it was like before recorded music and in particular before good quality recorded music. Can you imagine in the 18th and 19th centuries going to see a symphony by Beethoven and hanging on every note knowing that you might never hear this piece of music again in your life, or if you were lucky you might hear it a handful of times. How differently one would listen to music. It would not be the backdrop to the everyday but a true momentous event in life.

If you aren’t a fan of classical music, so be it, but imagine to if you weren’t in the caste of people who had access to the great music of the day in Vienna, Paris and London, what about the musical experience of the every man, in his village. He didn’t get to turn on the radio and toil away in the fields or put on some chill music at the end of a hard day with a brew in one hand. Music was likely experienced in church or was true folk music. Just the everyday song in the field. It can be really hard to imagine a world where you carry 10,000 songs in your pocket and can easily reach for the radio and find a station with something.

WIth recorded music we also created a scale for good and bad singing. These days only a small portion of the population that wants to be on American idol really sing anymore and then of course the ever dwindling churchgoers. But before the age of recorded music everybody sang and saying that someone was a good singer or a bad singer was as silly as saying they were a good talker or a bad talker. People talk, people sing. These days most people are too embarrassed to sing and if you ask most people will know will tell you they have a terrible voice.

So I’m trying to listen to music every week, and I have to admit it’s hard, my mind wonders to other things, and suddenly I realize I missed the song and I try and refocus. I am trying not to make this an intellectual exercise, I realize I could read about how to listen to music, there are books on this sort of things, but i am determined to actually be able to listen for one hour without intellectualizing just feeling the music. Wish me luck.