On Listening to Music
Have you ever laughed because of music? Have you ever smiled at the way someone plays, or at what they play? On any instrument - piano, drums, anything. I do not mean funny videos that are amusing because people are fallible. I mean that feeling when laughter tickles your stomach because someone is playing their instrument so brilliantly that your ears can barely absorb all the vibrations in the air. Or have you ever felt that you had to cry immediately, right there, because the energy pouring out of the music was so overwhelming? Have you ever watched a professional musician in amazement as they became one with the instrument on stage, while the whole band turned into a single organic unit and transported you into another universe for a few minutes or longer? Have you marvelled at the spider-like movement of a guitarist's fingers during a solo, or watched the expression on their face while they concentrate? And when you are not at a concert but listening at home with your eyes closed, have you ever noticed how sensational the backing vocals are, or how much the bass line adds to the song? Do you know how many tiny details make up a good recording? How many things contribute to making you feel exactly WHAT you feel while listening to music?
I do not know anyone who has ever told me they do not like music. If I ask what kind they like, I always get an answer too: a genre or genres, a list of bands or particular songs. Why do you like this track? I ask. Usually the answer is something like, "because it really rocks," "it's energetic," or "it's soft and romantic." Someone who ventures a little further might say, "the guitar solo is really good." Why do I say that person has ventured further? We will get to that in a moment.
Many people do not realize - or simply never think about it - that we can actually explain why a particular song sounds good to us and why we enjoy listening to it. People discuss paintings, and of course every other kind of artwork, in terms of colour, brushwork and so on. I certainly do not rush off to exhibitions every day, but when I occasionally - all right, rarely - visit one, I am always pleased when someone knowledgeable explains what is worth noticing in a particular picture. I do not mean meaningless nonsense generated by a bullshit machine, but the tiny details - sometimes literally individual strokes - that an untrained eye would never notice. Once somebody points them out, however, I can genuinely marvel at them. Music is no different.
Most of the time, adjectives such as "heavy," "energetic" and so on simply mean that we like the song as a whole: we are satisfied with the complete piece and therefore enjoy listening to it. I am especially pleased when someone praises a track by saying, "the guitar solo is really good," because that means they have listened to it consciously - or perhaps simply far too many times . Strange as it may sound, listening to music is something we can learn to do better.
Do you remember the unreasonable quantity of classical music we had to listen to in school music lessons? And having to identify the violin, perhaps the cello, or even the timpani? Can you picture the moment at the climax of the Hungarian national anthem when the cymbal player finally gets to perform his entire part ? In primary-school music classes our teachers tried, with varying degrees of success - rather less than more, as I remember it - to explain the mysteries of classical music. Yet even those memories surface more clearly in the hidden corners at the back of my mind than the heavy yellowish air of art classes filled with the smell of tempera paint. (At least I always preferred music lessons to art. ) Somewhere around the teaching of how to listen to music lies the real issue. Many people may have forgotten their school experiences, but the seed was planted nevertheless, regardless of the quality of those lessons. With this post I would like to pour a little water on that seed and see whether it starts to grow.
With a more mature, older head, learning how to listen - or, as I called it above, learning to listen consciously - is easier. You do not need a book and you do not have to study anything in advance. You need ears and attention. A little patience helps too. Even someone who stubbornly insists that they have no ear for music can do it. That claim is a misconception anyway: everyone has ears and musical perception that can be trained.
Conscious listening means noticing the part within the whole: the molecule, or the individual drop, in a glass of water while we drink it. Have you ever consciously drunk water after a good workout? Have you felt the water cooling and surrounding your tongue, perhaps the bubbles tingling against it ? As our ears absorb songs, we hear that somebody is singing. But do we also hear whether several peopleare singingtogether in the recording? Do they sing at the same time or one after another? Perhaps you never noticed that the lead singer is accompanied by backing vocals. Are those backing vocals female or male? We could ask many more questions about the vocal part or parts alone. And what about the instruments and accompaniment?
The foundation of most modern popular music is drums and bass guitar (or double bass). Very few popular songs contain neither. There is, admittedly - and this is a cautious value judgement on my part - a not especially complicated genre that consists almost entirely of those two: drum and bass. Some people certainly enjoy it; musically its content can be dissected very briefly and simply, and I will not spend words on it here. First, try to distinguish the instruments, just as we once did in music class . Perhaps we will enjoy doing it more now because we are concentrating on a song we already like instinctively. Can we distinguish the guitar from the other instruments? Can we listen to the whole track while deliberately following only the guitar? Do we notice that more than one guitar may be playing? Is there an acoustic guitar playing accompaniment throughout, with an electric lead guitar floating over it? Very often several guitars play accompaniment at the same time, and it can be almost impossible to distinguish - or count - exactly how many we are hearing. Now listen only to the drums. Notice the steady, pulsing rhythmic background and framework they provide for the entire composition. Can we hear different rhythmic patterns? How does the drummer alternate between cymbals, and how are those cymbal hits woven among the drum strokes? What other instruments can we hear? A piano, perhaps, or a synthesizer sound? Does it keep playing in the background throughout, or enter only in certain places - the introduction, a bridge, or perhaps at the end for a clever final touch? Does a string section glide in somewhere, with the violins gently filling out the entire soundscape? Are there wind instruments? What role do they play? Do they take a solo? Do they complement the vocal line? Is there an instrument or effect that sounds unusual, something we rarely hear or have never heard in another song?
How do the verses alternate, and what is the overall structure of the song? This is a little harder to follow or keep in your head. One approach is to find the lyrics online and read them while listening to the recording. That makes the task easier. By following the lyrics and hearing the music at the same time, we may notice that after two verses, for example, a bridge appears because the melody changes, the accompaniment changes, the lyrics have a different length, an instrument we have not previously heard comes in, or one of the existing instruments drops out or begins playing something completely different. That may therefore be a bridge, followed either by a new verse or by a section preparing the chorus. How long is the chorus? Is it restrained, or is that where the song suddenly bursts open and reaches its climax? How do we return to the verse? Through another transition? How does the song end? With a sudden stop? With a chord or melodic turn not previously used? Or does it simply fade away?
We can also listen for modulation. Modulation means that the song moves into another key - often, in popular music, a semitone higher than before. At such moments it can feel as though the previous pitch level has been "used up", as though the original key has become tired, and the remaining part of the song sets off refreshed with new energy at a slightly higher level. A textbook example is Roxette's How Do You Do?: less than a minute passes before we hear a modulation, at around 0:50, and they are not stingy with them because another two or so follow later. It is interesting to listen for how modulation is used, although today it is considered a rather conventional device.
We can go further still, although that requires a little musical background. We can ask what chord progression the song is built on, both overall and within the verses, chorus and other sections. These are the chords we see when we download a song's chords from the internet and, as we often do here on the blog, mark them above the lyrics. But the relationships between those chords are anything but arbitrary. Discovering these relationships is fascinating, and it often reveals that there is not all that much that is completely new under the sun. Countless harmonic turns have been used thousands of times. They may simply be transposed to another key, dressed up with unusual instrumentation, or given some other creative twist so that we never think, "haven't I heard this before somewhere?" Who would guess that the verse progression of the Beatles' Let It Be, the verses of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours, the chorus of Elton John's Can You Feel the Love Tonight and the verses of the Hungarian song 67-es út by Republic all follow the same harmonic pattern? To be precise, the sequence of major and minor chords built on the relevant scale degrees is the same; transposing them would give the same actual chords. But that is a topic for a later post. Tempo, key, instrumentation, accompaniment, backing vocals and many other small musical ideas and circumstances make songs individual even when they are based on a frequently used chord progression. Unfortunately there are exceptions where the borrowing is painfully obvious; here is one particularly alarming example (The Beatles - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da vs. The Offspring - Why Don't You Get a Job?).
YouTube is full of videos demonstrating this phenomenon - showing just how many songs have been built on the same chord progression.
Returning to the subject of listening to music: above I have asked a great many questions, some easier and some harder, that we can try to answer while listening to a particular song. The point is not to dissect every track into musical atoms, but to listen a little more consciously, pay attention to details, and notice the musical ideas and turns that the composer or arranger has placed here and there. It is no accident that I have said nothing about lyrics or music videos. For one thing, lyrics generally do not interest me very much; I look elsewhere for profound thoughts. As far as I am concerned a song can be about digging the garden if the music grips me - the rest does not matter. Music videos do not interest me much either. Music is for listening, not watching; if a song needs a video merely to become interesting, something is already wrong. Concert footage is another matter: I love watching musicians work with their instruments. The question of music videos leads into another topic - pre-packaged, colourful, scented industrial music production, where quality and invention matter less than the message "buy it!". I will save my dreadful opinions on that subject for another article, but I could certainly write plenty of both solicited and, especially, unsolicited thoughts about DJs who call themselves "musicians", electronic "music", Justin Biebers and the various catastrophic Hungarian talent shows and tabloid programmes. Although, to be fair, the Hungarian blogs comment.com and hogyvolt have already covered the latter exhaustively and brilliantly.
I am curious whether, if you now listen to your favourite song, dear Reader, you can hear it with slightly different ears. Do you notice anything extra? Do you discover something your attention may previously have passed over? I hope so. Perhaps a musical idea will make you smile, or perhaps tears will come to your eyes because you suddenly notice a small piece of beauty that had escaped you until now. The more songs you listen to consciously, the more new things you will discover, and experiencing the joy of musical discovery is a wonderful thing!
