{"id":276,"date":"2010-03-29T18:10:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T18:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=276"},"modified":"2010-03-29T18:10:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T18:10:16","slug":"we_dont_need_no_classical_musi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2010\/03\/we_dont_need_no_classical_musi\/","title":{"rendered":"We Don’t Need No (Classical Music) Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"readall.jpg\"Maybe it’s best to listen first and ask questions later when it comes to appreciating music? That’s what a recent study published in the Psychology of Music<\/i> journal seems to suggest. In “When program notes don’t help: Music descriptions and enjoyment<\/a>,” Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (University of Arkansas) explores the reactions of non-musicians to samples of Beethoven string quartets. Those participants who listened without first wading through program notes found the experience more enjoyable. Margulis suggests that perhaps “when people without extensive formal training listen to music in terms of verbal descriptions, they may work so hard at connecting the notes into label-able phenomena that they lose the ability … to hear the subtle interconnections among the sounds. These interconnections may be fundamental to music enjoyment.” So much for “if you teach them, they will come.”<\/p>\n

The study came across my desk via the new-to-me but very enlightening Miller-McCune website<\/a>, and you can read more about Margulis’s work there<\/a> (as well as a great piece<\/a> on David Cope’s AI “composer”). Unless I’m actively researching a piece of music, I usually ignore the program or liner notes that accompany the auditory experience, at least at first. Like a child, I don’t want to be told things. A new piece of music is an exciting thing, and I want to run off and explore the sound world being offered. Let me get inside and wander around a bit before making me sit and read an essay rooted in someone else’s interpretation. Margulis is very cautious not to dismiss program notes as completely without merit, but reporter Tom Jacobs notes this tasty line from the report attributed to composer and musical theorist Leonard Meyer: “Listening to music intelligently is more like knowing how to ride a bicycle than knowing why a bicycle is ridable.”<\/p>\n

(If the intro music<\/a> to this post was undeniably Pink Floyd, then the exit track<\/a> is provided courtesy of Queen.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe it’s best to listen first and ask questions later when it comes to appreciating music? That’s what a recent study published in the Psychology of Music journal seems to suggest. In “When program notes don’t help: Music descriptions and enjoyment,” Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (University of Arkansas) explores the reactions of non-musicians to samples of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}