As a musician, whenever I’m listening to music I have a tendency to analyze every piece of the music and figure out exactly what’s going on.
Recently I’ve been trying to just listen. Just take in everything. No analyzing. Just listening.
It’s made listening to music much more enjoyable. It’s also made analyzing music by ear easier. My guess is that I have a larger repository of music to compare songs to.
If you only know what one song sounds like then you only have that frame of reference.
If you know how 50 songs sound and can recall them fairly well then you have a larger frame of reference.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music recently and one thing I’ve noticed is that differences in genres may simply be different choices of instruments. The notes and rhythms themselves may be fairly similar or even the same between two genres, but the main thing that distinguishes the genres are the timbral and instrumental differences.
For example, blues music, rock music, and country music are fairly similar in terms of notes and rhythms. But many of the differences between them are in the specific choices of instruments and timbres of those instruments. They’re all genres that are tonal and have mostly diatonic chord progressions, and often use a 12 bar blues form. They all have solos and often those solos use pentatonic scales. The melodies are often using a pentatonic scale. They often have drumsets that play a backbeat and include guitars, bass, vocals and maybe piano.
But the timbres of those instruments may be different. Country music has twangier vocals than the other three. Rock music often has singing in a higher register than the other three and/or more aggressive singing. The guitars in rock music will likely have more distortion than the other three. Blues music may have electric guitar with light distortion while country music often has acoustic guitar or a clean sounding electric guitar. The basses between these three genres will likely have different timbres as well. Blues music and country music may include an acoustic double bass while rock music would be more likely to have an electric bass.
These are just some of the differences between the these genres.
One thing I think is interesting is that you can “change” the genre of a song simply by choosing different instruments. Some sounds are so ingrained into one style of music that simply changing the instruments you’re hearing, even if they’re playing the exact same notes and rhythms, can change what genre the song sounds like.
My guitar teacher in high school did an exercise with me where he told me to start soloing in A minor pentatonic. He started playing an accompaniment that sounded like blues music, with a 12 bar blues and dominant 7 chords. I was playing a blues solo. He then told me to keep soloing as he changed the accompaniment. He switched it to a power chord based accompaniment, using the same 12 bar blues structure and suddenly I was playing a rock solo. He then switched to strumming the same 12 bar chords, without the dominant 7s, and suddenly I was playing a country solo.
Simple and subtle changes between instrumentation can change a lot about a genre of music.
If you’ve never noticed this before I recommend listening to some old school rock musicians like Chuck Berry, and then listening to the Beach Boys or the Beatles. Then listen to something slightly more modern like Queen or Journey and continue getting more modern until you’re listening to the Black Keys or Band of Skulls. As you do this, starting from the beginning, you’ll notice how related all of those different styles are. You could do the same thing, starting with Chuck Berry, and listening to blues artists or country artists.
One of my minors at Berklee was conducting and one of the things I’d do in my free time is go to the library and follow along with scores. I’d find a recording and play it while following the music in the score.
I enjoy doing this, but it’s also an effective way to get used to reading orchestral music. Orchestra scores have anywhere from 7 to 30 or 40 staves so it can take some practice to get used to paying attention to so many different things.
When you start doing this you might just be able to follow along with one instrument or one line. That’s okay. Follow that one line and start looking at and following other lines as you listen. You can switch between lines that you’re following to give yourself some practice following different instruments. I liked to practice following the inner lines like the viola or the middle horns or a clarinet line if they weren’t playing the melody. This will give you practice listening for inner lines that might be harder to hear and will grab your attention less.
Once you get used to doing that try to follow along with two lines at a time. I suggest the bass or melody and any other voice. Those lines, bass and melody, will be fairly easy to follow so that might make it a little easier.
This might take some time depending on how familiar with reading music you are, but the more you follow scores the easier it’ll be.
Eventually you’ll be able to listen to a piece of music and imagine what the score would be, basically doing this the other way around. Doing that for the first time can feel a little strange because you’re hearing the music in a different way than you were before, but it can help you see music slightly differently.
Give it a try if you’ve got access to an orchestral score.
A friend of mine recently showed me this piece of music and I thought it was really interesting, So this post will be a few thoughts I had after listening to it a few times.
First let me start off by saying I absolutely love this piece of music. It’s a bit strange sounding and kind of avant-garde, but I really like the story it tells about music, or at least the story I tell myself that it tells about music … that probably didn’t make any sense.
The main thing I hear when I listen to this is an exploration. At the time that György Ligeti wrote this (1958) electronic instruments were fairly new. They hadn’t been used in a whole lot and the Moog synthesizer hadn’t even been created yet (it was released in 1962). So this piece is quite literally exploring how electronics can be used to create different audio and musical sounds.
I also hear an exploration of what it means for a piece of art to be music. This piece of music isn’t music in the traditional sense of music with a meter and pitches notated on paper and acoustic instruments and harmonies and triads. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t music. It’s still music.
It’s exploring the different sounds that can be created and programmed using synthesizers. It’s also exploring rhythm in the sense that it’s using rhythms that aren’t metered how most rhythms in music are; metered rhythms are rhythms that are dividing time into even chunks. Un-metered rhythms do not divide up time into even chunks.
If you’ve never written music like this it can be incredibly useful to practice doing to see just how much you can explore. I often decide an emotion or a feeling that I want to convey and try to convey that feeling while also exploring different aspects of music. This keeps me focused on something, conveying that emotion, to prevent me from just writing a bunch of random notes.
Another idea is to try to use one single motif as much as possible without it getting old or boring. See how many different ways you can vary one single motif to create as much music as possible.
I’ve been watching Mozart in the Jungle recently and it reminds me, sometimes, of some of the conducting classes that I took while at Berklee College of Music.
One of my teachers Ronald Feldman would have us sit in a circle in a room and read through and study scores. While studying scores the first step was always to notice everything on the page. We would list out loud things that we noticed in the music. We’d say, “I see eighth notes. I see forte symbols. I see crescendos. I see D major. I see 3/4.” That’s how we’d start studying our scores.
It can help tremendously because we make sure we see everything on the page. We saw every detail and symbol and then we could figure out what was happening in the music. But we needed to notice everything first and there’s often a whole bunch of different markings on the page; too many to notice immediately.
So take some time and notice everything on the page first. Start there.
A few semesters ago I was taking an education class and we were asked to think of what both students and teachers want from their classroom.
My answer was “to be teaching something they enjoy and learning about something they enjoy.” Teachers want to be teaching things they enjoy teaching and students want to enjoy learning about things they enjoy learning about.
So my professor followed up with me, “How do you figure out what they want to learn about?”
I’d never thought of an answer to this question so I answered, “Well I don’t know. That’s the difficult part of it.”
And she said, “I don’t mean this as a ‘gotcha’, but you could just ask them.”
And I love thinking of that because sometimes I get so caught up in trying to “solve” a problem with a fancy “solution”, when there’s a very simple answer that I could use instead.
I currently have a piano student who is learning a piano rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg and she’s having trouble playing some of the details.
So what I have her do is practice the details, but exaggerate them. If you’re practicing dynamics changes, make the changes bigger. If you’re practicing staccato versus legato, make the difference bigger. Make the legato more legato and the staccato more staccato. Make the changes larger.
What this does is get you in the habit of thinking about the changes as being noticeable and it expands your own playing range. If when you play staccato and legato they sound similar you need to expand your range of articulations to make sure that the difference between those two can be heard.
If when you play mezzopiano and forte they sound the same, you need to expand your dynamic range so that those two are much more distinct.
This is something that’s likely fairly easy for musicians to hear in other musicians, even less experienced ones, but it’s much harder to put into your own playing and play yourself. Creating this large dynamic range, or range of articulations, takes quite a lot of effort and thought because you need to notice that you don’t have it and make sure you figure out how to play much quieter and much softer than you’re already comfortable with.
At first it’ll feel like you’re playing way too loud and way to quiet and that it’s useless to do so, until you need to do it.
You’ll be happy you have a dynamic range when you need to play a ballad that develops to forte in the middle or end. It’ll make the whole piece sound much more beautiful and much more musical.
Without those details it might not sound as musical or beautiful.
This is something that I don’t really think much about in my music because I’ve mostly been writing music either purely for enjoyment or for self expression. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a useful question to ask.
When writing music it can be incredibly useful to ask yourself this question. What specific emotion do you want your song to convey? Maybe you just think it sounds cool and that’s it, but maybe you’re trying to write a piece of music that could work as background music during a love scene for example. That’s what I did when I was at Berklee studying film scoring a lot of the time.
We’d take a scene and re-score it. We’d re-compose the music and put our own take on the scene.
It’s difficult to convey one specific emotion if you’ve never done it before because you might end up writing something that’s a little too hopeful, or maybe not hopeful enough. Or maybe you write something that’s supposed to sound like a love theme, but it ends up sounding too melancholy. That happened to me a few times.
It can also be useful to flip the question as a listener. What specific emotion is being conveyed?
This one can be a little difficult to do, again if you haven’t ever done it.
Is it a melancholy theme or is it a sorrowful theme? The difficulty isn’t in deciding whether something sounds happy or sad to you, but rather in deciding what specific type of happy or sad it sounds.
Does it sound jubilant or triumphant?
Those are two positive emotions, and we might describe both of those songs as “happy”, but they’re very different emotions and would require very different musical ideas to convey them.