Music Listening as Foundational Musical Behavior

Music listening is foundational to every generative musical behavior—composing, improvising, and performing. For example, singers in a choral setting learn to listen not only to their own vocal contributions, but also to surrounding singers, in part, to synchronize dynamics, staggered breathing, vowel sounds, and tone color. A pianist in a jazz combo listens to ensure their vision for an improvisation matches the pitches and rhythms produced by their fingers, while also listening for and incorporating into their own product ideas performed by other musicians in the group. A composer listens voraciously to diverse musics, such that the sounds, styles, and feelingful impressions inform their own compositional style.

Kaschub (2016) called for music students to actively engage in each of three primary music-making roles (i.e., composing, performing, listening), acknowledging that “the very nature of music demands the interaction of all three” (p. 58). Kaschub and Smith (2016) suggested that these roles share complementary “musical capacities”—in- nately human potentials, or possibilities, for “knowing” music and fully experiencing these generative musical roles in purposeful and meaningful ways. Because of the intersections of the musical capacities, it is difficult for people to assume only one of these roles as they engage in musical activity. For example, performers consider the composer’s articulated ideas, listeners experience performers’ interpretations of the composer’s visions, and composer’s listen for ways that performers and composers craft musical sounds as models for conveying musical and feelingful impressions.

Kaschub and Smith (2016) proposed capacities specific to music listeners: (1) purposeful attention to the music, (2) musical impressivity, and (3) artistic perception. Listeners have agency to determine the reasons for listening, the amount of attention given to the music listening task, and the attention afforded to specific musical events related to the composition and/or performance. Listeners have the capacity to become aware of how the composer (as mediated by performers) created and organized sounds and communicated musical impressions—musical representations—of emotions by provoking feelingful states.

Listeners are mindful of how these sounds make them feel according to sociocultural aesthetic norms and within the physical spaces in which the music is heard. Listeners also have the capacity to become sensitive to, perceive, process, and interpret the skillful and artistic ways that composers employ compositional tools and techniques to create music that invites feelingful responses by listeners and performers alike. Listeners enlist these musical capacities as they intentionally choose to engage with musical sounds, embody connections between those sounds and the feelings they invite, and, ultimately, create uniquely personal meaning from the sounds that are perceived, prioritized, and processed.

Each music-making role not only involves a person’s musical capacities, but also creative thinking that leads to a product experienced as a composition, an improvisation, and/or a performance. Webster (2002) defined creative thinking as “the engagement of the mind in the active structured process of thinking in sound for the purpose of producing some product new for the creator” (p. 26). He marked music listening as a creative endeavor since it provokes listeners to engage in creative thinking that enables them to make aesthetic decisions, spend time with the music, and have intentions for purposeful listening.

While music listening engages students’ critical and creative thinking, music educators in the United States often situate music listening as a passive, “responsive” activity in comparison to music performance experiences. This disposition minimizes the creative enterprise that is irrefutably involved, whether a listener is barely aware of the music or the listener is keenly attuned to what is being heard. Unfortunately, music listening is typically interpreted as “purposeful” only if it involves tacit listening followed by discourse regarding music theoretical attributes or historical and cultural contexts.

There are many everyday reasons for listening to music, however, most which do not involve intentional analytical listening. To be clear, information about music theory, history, and cultural contexts are important knowledge bases for students to possess, but teaching these constructs alone disregards the reciprocal relationship of person (listener) and the music, at the heart of which is artistic and emotional connection. We miss opportunities in music classes and rehearsal settings when we prioritize academic musical deconstruction over personal experience that is (or is not) created as a result of listening to music.

Like performing, composing, and improvising, music listening is a personally creative process, resulting in externalized and observable physical responses and internal, less obvious physiological, cognitive, and affective responses unique unto each individual (Dunn, 2006; Kerchner, 2014; Morrison, 2009; Peterson, 2006). In the aggregate, these tangible and intangible (even ineffable) music listening responses comprise the music experience, and it is this experience that is the resultant creative product of music listening. The intersections of “old” and “new” cognitive structures and, more holistically, the feelings, socio-cultural contexts, and associations bound to the music listening experience lead to a uniquely-created, personal musical experience. This “new” experience, in turn, becomes the “prior experience” that influences and is foundational for future music experiences.

Refined musical meaning is crafted as one listens to music that moves them beyond their currently held mental models, brain mappings, and embodied emotions. These integrated body-mind-spirit-feelingful processes and products are inherently linked to one’s memory of prior musical and non-musical experiences, the strength of emotions attached to these experiences, and the listener’s imagination employed during the creation (production) of personally novel music listening experiences (Kerchner, 2021).