A Guide to Classical Listening

Whether it’s Adams or Beethoven (or Yardumian or Zelenka) that you’re hearing for the first time, there’s one thing you must do if you expect to get anything out of the music: pay attention.

Classical music tends to be complex. You can’t just prick up one ear to catch the lyrics like you do with popular songs, because much of the classical music you encounter has no words, and chances are that the works that do have lyrics will be in a language you don't understand.

So listen to what’s going on. Don’t let your mind wander. If you start daydreaming, the images the music helps you summon might tell you a great deal about yourself, but they won't tell you much about the music.

And just what are you listening for in the music? This is where things become complicated. People interested in aesthetics - the philosophical study of beauty, its sources, its forms and its effects on us – have long argued about what we can hear in music.

Everything you’re about to read can be disputed by aestheticians with their own ideas about the nature of music. So take this as simply one approach among many, one that's kept on an admittedly simple level.

With that understood, let’s propose that, basically, the content of music comes down to two things – structure and expression.

When approaching a work you’ve never heard, you must try to understand the composer’s intentions. Perhaps the composer is concerned most of all with structure; in that case, it helps to recognize the musical patterns in use – sonata-allegro form, serial method, whatever.

Every piece has some sort of form, but for many composers the expressive content is even more important. There may not be a story behind every melody and harmonic progression, but the musical effects may nevertheless be intended to convey some emotion or express a particular point of view.

The first movement of Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1, for example, does not follow a story. It is built on traditional musical principles, with a fairly slow introduction followed by a sonata-allegro structure.

But the movement can also be described in non-musical terms quite accurately as “dramatic” or “stormy”. This is abstract drama – an example of musical expression.

Igor Stravinsky maintained that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all.” But Stravinsky’s music is among the most individual and expressive of this century.

Perhaps what Stravinsky meant was that no particular sequence of notes can literally tell a tale, no chord can truly mean love or the color green or anything else. True enough.

Yet a score’s more general expressive qualities – “storminess”' or “warmth” – are the easiest to evaluate at first hearing. For listeners who are not professional musicians, and for some who are, a work’s expressive qualities make the strongest first impression – or create the greatest initial disappointment.

Even though a work’s first impact on a listener is emotional, music is the product of reason and intellect. So music’s structure – a purely intellectual, not emotional, matter - must be taken into account as well as expression.

But few listeners other than musicologists, music theorists and egghead critics can really comprehend a work’s structure on first hearing, unless it’s a fairly simple framework and we've been warned to pay attention for it.

Anybody can hear a key change. But knowing that it’s a change from tonic to dominant, or that we’ve been plunged into a “distant” key that shares few notes with the original and there’s a long way to go until everything is resolved – such large-scale tonal structures are really too much for many people to grasp.

Aesthetics specialist Nicholas Cook has complained that the technical explanations commonly found in program notes, record jacket blurbs or even books such as this do more to frighten people than to enlighten them.

On the other hand, Cook warns that “audibility is not everything”. The inaudible, rational element is what holds music together.

When composers describe their music with words, the first element of evaluation could be, how does the music stand up to the prose? Does what the flutes and piano play really sound like bird calls? Can the listener detect what the composer has said should be “a distant, elegiac” quality?

Read what you can about a piece of music before you listen to it. Try to discover the composer’s intentions, the methods used to put the composition together, the social context of the work – the influences on the music’s expressive content.

And never stop with a list of your top 40 favorites. If you like one piece by a certain composer, listen to other music by that composer and his or her contemporaries, friends, enemies and immediate predecessors and followers.

If you don’t like a composition the first time you hear it, listen to it again and again until you understand what the composer was getting at. You still may not like it, but at least you’ll know why.

The more music you've heard – the more music you've paid attention to – the easier it will become to understand each new piece you encounter. You’ll be able to put it into context more quickly. You'll recognise the forms it employs more easily.

Even if you never quite get the hang of parallel fifths and plagal cadences, you'll be more accustomed to the expressive style of the composer, place and period.

You’ll understand there’s no reason to be timid about classical music.