Lucky you (well, maybe). You get to sit in on one of my music appreciation classes that I don't teach anymore. And unlike my music appreciation classes, I’ll teach this whole thing in only one lesson, rather than taking half of the first semester. (Attendance is not required, so feel free to bow out now. I’ll take questions at the end.) In the process, I'll likely slay some sacred cows, so if you disagree with my low opinion of a particular artist, it doesn't mean that you have poor taste, it just means we're likely listening for different things. Nonetheless, I think that the more you can listen for, the more interesting music becomes, just like someone who knows the rules of baseball will enjoy a game more than someone who doesn’t (not that music has “rules” per se, but there are certain conventions that apply to different styles).
Begin lecture. Fuzzy Red Dogs Play Tinker Toys. The above phrase is a mnemonic I made up to help remember the six listening categories (which I adapted from composer Aaron Copland’s “How to Listen to Music”). These categories are how musicians tend to hear music, even if they aren't fully aware of it. Paying attention to each category individually will help you get at more of the music. When a piece of music is interesting, it's usually because the composer has set up expectations in one or more of these categories and then broken them, which I’ll talk about more at the end. The mnemonic stands for Form, Rhythm, Dynamics, Pitch, Timbre, and Texture. -F: Form: The structure of the piece. What repeats itself, what's new, and what’s a variation on old material? Most pop music follows a simple form similar to verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. For most listeners, form is the hardest to hear, in part because it takes focused attention over a period of time. But it often brings the greatest rewards, too. Pink Floyd's "The Wall" brings back some themes in unexpected places in the album, two of the most obvious being when "We don't need no education" reappears in the bass line several times throughout the album, and how the same children's chorus opens and closes the album. -R: Rhythm: How is time divided? The beat, yes, but also the groupings of beats, the division of beats, etc. If you're listening for rhythm, you might recognize that the main hook of Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya’ comes from a regular 4-beat grouping that is suddenly interrupted by a 2-beat grouping, which plays with your expectations in a satisfying way. This is a great example of how a musician would hear it without noticing it, because they have such an internalized feeling for beat grouping. But a non-musician can hear it too if they're paying attention to the rhythm. To use another PInk Floyd example, “Money” is in lopsided groups of 7 (or 4+3, depending on how you feel it) until the chorus relaxes briefly into a steady, consistent 4 (last Pink Floyd example, I promise). -D: Dynamics: Louds and softs. Easy to notice and they add easy variety. In a car radio, the engine covers the softs, and since most people listen to music in the car now, there's not a lot of dynamics in pop music. But it still exists in movie scores, classical music, and jazz. -P: Pitch: The notes. We usually divide this into melody (the part you sing) and harmony (the chords). Most people just listen to the melody, but you can instantly get more out of music by just directing your attention to the other things that are happening. There’s a whole rabbit hole to go down here, but I’ll just add a couple other oversimplified considerations: dissonance vs. consonance (unpleasant vs. pleasant sounding, tension and resolution, conjunct (stepwise) and disjunct (jumping around) melodies. Laura Marling’s album ‘Semper Femina’ was a huge creative leap forward for her because her melodies suddenly became more disjunct without losing their line. The Beatles were especially good at interweaving conjunct melodies that were easy to follow with unexpected harmonies that surprised and delighted. Weezer’s “Miss Sweeney” strips the melody of the verse down to a single note (during which the narrator speaks in a repressed monotone), which the chorus (and the narrator’s sudden confession of love/obsession) breaks wide open. Harmony and melody are closely related to form, and a good writer/composer will use those pieces to inform the structure of the piece, and vice versa. Sufjan Stevens’ ‘All Delighted People’ is a great example of a large structure pulled out of very simple melodies and harmonies. Beethoven’s 5th is so famous in part because he constructs a massive (for the time) symphony out of the first four notes. -T: Timbre (pronounced tam-burr): In art terms, this is the “color” of the sound. This is what the vast majority of people listen to when they listen to music. The easiest way to describe this is to imagine the sound of two different voices singing the same note. The difference is one of timbre. One person’s voice might be raspy and the other’s is pure. A male voice might have to strain for a high note while a female voice singing the same note is relaxed. That's all timbre. We fall in love with certain voices because of their timbre. Guitar distortion is also an example of timbre, as is the difference in tone quality between a professional and a beginner. Jack Johnson’s “It’s All Understood” uses two different snare drums—one in the verses and another in the chorus—and the slight difference in timbre creates a subtle change in mood. Because it’s easy to hear, people often attach parts of their identity and tribal signaling into timbre. When Bob Dylan went electric, timbre is what pissed people off. It didn't sound like folk music anymore. He was singing about the same subjects, with the same forms, harmonies, and melodies as before, but suddenly his timbre had changed. -T: Texture: This refers to the differences in how the parts overlap. Are they all moving together, are they in a relay, are they all doing different things at once, or are they repeating each other? Taking away and adding parts are also variations in texture. When “the beat drops,” that's actually a texture thing, not a rhythm thing. The different styles of dance music usually focus more on changing textures than anything else. For some simple examples of layering to create different textures, I would have you compare Cake, MGMT, and Sylvan Esso, each of whom uses completely different timbres but similar approaches to texture layering. Text is also an important consideration in a song, but it’s extra-musical, so I won't get into it except to say that a good songwriter/composer will write the music to support the text, and will either write or choose a good text to begin with. When I get excited about an artist, it's usually because they’re combining two or more of these in a unique way. Big Thief often has stripped-down melodies (pitch) of only one or two notes that combine with Adrianne Lenker’s raw voice (timbre) and dissonant, distorted guitar (pitch and timbre) to create a powerful emotional punch when she finally opens up. Sufjan Stevens combines minimalist melodies with dissonance and unexpected rhythms to build up massive textures and forms. When I can't stand an artist, it's usually because they are falling back on tired cliches, like moving the pitch up a half step (a modulation, in musical parlance). It's not that those cliches are inherently bad, just that they aren't a substitute for actual creativity. In some cases, its because they are breaking expectations in a way that doesn’t make any sense, like when Kenny G plays the wrong notes (for a fun read, here’s Pat Metheny’s brutal take on Kenny G). Even technically skilled musicians can be super boring if they never do anything unusual, like the glut of amateur blues guitarists at your local county fair, or in my opinion, Michael Bublé (who also can't swing to save his life, but that's because he's a pop artist, not a jazz singer, and that’s okay because he’s singing for a different audience). Meanwhile, masters of craft like Beck and Fiona Apple can make huge leaps outside of your expectations that feel inevitable within their self-contained universes. And of course, this multifaceted approach to listening is why so many musicians who have studied for several years become attracted to classical and jazz: we’re looking for things that will surprise us, and only the rarest of pop music can do that. End of lecture. I'll now take your questions and comments.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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