Music Listening as a Creative Act in Middle and High School

Music listening as a creative act

In recent years, educators have come to recognize the importance of building young children's music listening skills. Classroom activities now aim to engage elementary students by directing their attention toward some aspect of musical excerpts. These activities include movement, designing diagrams that highlight prominent features of a listening selection (iconic representations and listening maps), following call charts that point out specific musical characteristics as they arise in the example, and composing or performing music that illustrates a particular feature of the piece. In essence, music educators today ask students to participate actively in the listening experience.

But what about older students in middle school and high school? Do their teachers likewise challenge them to think and participate imaginatively in listening? How might educators bridge the creative gap between what students encounter in elementary music classes and what awaits them in secondary classrooms?

Listening to music is a creative endeavor, not a passive act. Listeners craft and re-craft their own musical experience by perceiving certain musical elements. They do this largely by focusing on one or several features, forming relationships among them, and then responding to those relationships. The particular culture in which a listener lives often determines what sound relationships count as “musical.” Reimer (1989) observed that

. . . musical perception and musical reaction are brought to bear in such a way that [the listener] is, in a real sense, creating along with the music. [The listener] is absorbed in the world of expressive sound, both molding the experience by his active participation and being molded by the events as they interact with his expectations (p. 129).

Engaging on this level involves cognitive acts such as perception, focusing attention, recalling, and comparing. The process also includes anticipation or expectation, as listeners draw on previous experience to recognize traits specific to a musical style.

Still, the ability to perceive sounds, order them, and reshape mental musical structures represents only part of an aesthetic musical experience. Equally essential is a student's capacity to respond meaningfully to the music. Affective and perceptual abilities function together as an integrated process, and nurturing this synthesis is the goal of instruction aimed at creative music listening.

How to make listening a creative activity

Ideally, creative music-listening activities stimulate creative mental processes. These include both performance and non-performance tasks that teachers can also use to assess students' growth as listeners.

How can middle and high school educators ensure the continued development of perceptual and affective responses? Could activities used at the elementary level be adapted for older students? Although many approaches exist, the focus here is on activities that elicit multiple sensory responses and give teachers a window into their students' listening development.

Music educators sometimes lean too heavily on verbal descriptions of what students perceive and feel. Secondary school students do possess a more developed vocabulary than younger children, but they still tend to misapply musical terms. Some have weak verbal skills; others express themselves more readily through sight, sound, or movement.

Tasks that demand creative involvement require repeated hearings of a musical exemplar. Repeated listening allows students to notice details that might have gone overlooked. Greater familiarity with a piece builds musical knowledge and refines the mental frameworks students use to make sense of what they hear and how they respond.

Imagine with diagrams

Mapping is a non-verbal way for students to describe their listening experience. During this activity, students mark down whatever drawings, words, or graphs capture their thoughts, impressions, and feelings as they listen to an excerpt two or three times. After finishing, they share their maps with a partner or the teacher. Explaining their map to someone else puts the student in the role of instructor. Mapping also supports conceptual learning: once students have “discovered” musical examples, the teacher can attach appropriate terminology to the specific events the students have already described in their own words or pictures. Lessons built this way are student-centered, growing out of each student's focus of attention and perceptual-emotional abilities.

A particularly revealing approach involves a few students creating their maps on overhead transparencies during successive listenings, using a different color each time. This allows the accumulation of information to be traced from one hearing to the next. After a brief verbal explanation of the transparency map, the student points to the relevant sections while the class listens once more to the excerpt. Showing this during the music often discloses details the student might struggle to put into words. Students can then compare their own maps to the one on the overhead, gaining perspective on alternatives to their own listening strategies. This comparison highlights the multiple legitimate ways of attending to music. A student might be challenged to listen while following another person's map, an exercise that can bring new details to the foreground while preserving attention to those noted on the student's own map.

Experience with movement

Kinesthetic expression can also reveal what music features students perceive and respond to while listening (Kerchner, 1996). Observing movement gives teachers information beyond what maps or verbal accounts might provide.

Yet older learners are often hesitant to move. You may want to start with upper-body movement, hand gestures, or group activities until the students feel more at ease. Adolescents may be self-conscious about moving for developmental reasons, or perhaps because movement activities do not occur often enough for them to become comfortable. By staying attentive to students' needs, the teacher can ease them into movement until it becomes a productive form of musical description.

Students can work alone to convey with their bodies a musical feature that catches their interest. They can show melodic contour with their hands, conduct along to the excerpt, indicate phrases or dynamic changes with their arms, step a syncopated rhythm, or invent a gesture that captures a style or mood. Any motion could start in a seated position and graduate to full body exploration as confidence grows. Teachers can also encourage free movement where students simply respond as the music compels them.

Small group movement activities reduce the intimidation that comes with solo work. A useful strategy is to reassure anxious students that movement arrangements must involve no physical contact. The teacher might specify a musical feature to depict as a static “body sculpture.” The task, then, is to devise one or more solutions to the given problem:

• Groups of three depicting a fugue melody as it passes among instruments or voices
• Pairing up to choreograph hand motions that match the number of beats per phrase
• Arrange three or four bodies to illustrate a polyphonic moment versus a homophonic passage in Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”

Assessing musical understanding

Whatever the method chosen, students need chances to compare, contrast, hypothesize, analyze, evaluate, and reimagine what they hear. When these experiences are expressed in verbal and non-verbal ways, the teacher gains a more complete view of each student's listening development. Using a mix of verbal description, mapping, and movement also suits learners with different styles of engagement. Multisensory response activities help students become aware of their own thinking, giving them insight and some control over their musical growth.

Resources

Kerchner, J. (1996). Perceptual and affective components of the music listening experience as manifested in children’s verbal, visual, and kinesthetic representations. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.

Reimer, B. (1989). A philosophy of music education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.