Do you like it? And why?

I ask my students this question every single time I play them a piece of music. I ask them to tell me whether or not they like the piece of music, and why they like it or why they don’t like it. I don’t accept answers like “I love it because it’s the best” or “I hate it because it’s the worst.” And they’ve all gotten used to that. They’ve learned to be able to say specifically what it is that they like or dislike about a piece of music. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not they like it, but they’ve got to be able to articulate why they like it or don’t.

It’s a great thing to do if you don’t normally think about music much. It’ll change how you listen to music. Here are some questions you can ask about the music:

Does the melody skip or is it step-wise?
What does the harmony sound like?
What does the rhythm sound like?
What meter is it in?
What emotion is being conveyed?
What is the form?
What instruments are you hearing?
What songs does it remind you of? Why?
What type of scene in a movie or TV show could it be placed?

Some of these questions might seem simple, while others seem very involved, but they’re all different things to ask about the music.

Can you articulate exactly what emotion you think a song or piece of music is conveying? That’s a fairly surface-level question, but even that question tricks people up sometimes.

What about the instruments? Can you actually hear and pay attention to every instrument in a song? Can you identify what instruments you’re hearing?

Does it remind you of anything? This one is tricky because it could remind you of a song for any reason at all. But once you’ve found something that it reminds you of, try to figure out exactly why? Are there similarities between those two songs? Do they share any aspects of music? Or maybe there’s a memory that it reminds you of?

Once you can start doing that you’ll be much better equipped to listen to music on a deeper level.

But that’s just the beginning.

Can you identify what harmonies are being used? Can you identify what scales are being used? Can you identify any key changes that happen in the music? Can you identify themes or repeated sections?+

Try to think of a piece of music like a film soundtrack. Film soundtracks often have themes for different characters. Those themes aren’t only played when that character is present, but they have musical themes that represent certain ideas in the film. Throughout the film, those themes will come back. You might hear the theme for the main character played when someone is thinking of that main character. You might hear short snippets of that theme at the beginning before they’ve been introduced as the main character.

When you’re listening to any piece of music try to listen for repetition. Is there any repeated musical material? Repeated melodies. Repeated chord progressions. Repeated rhythms. Try to really be aware of those things when they’re repeated and pay attention to how they’re repeated. You’ll learn a lot about a piece of music if you do that. You’ll learn about the form of the piece of music.

Maybe it’s too repetitive and you don’t like that. Maybe you like that it has multiple sections where it repeats the same material.

Try to really figure out what’s going on in a piece of music and see what you like about it and what you don’t like about it.

It’ll help you better understand the music you listen to. It’ll also help you better understand what you like about the music you listen to.

Maybe you really like the sound of a certain instrument, but you’d never realized it because you never noticed that that’s what all the songs you like have in common. Pay attention to that. It’ll add a lot to the act of listening to music and appreciating music.

ISJ