This week’s reading focused on the different ways people respond to music and how teachers strive to achieve certain curricular goals by teaching students to listen and respond to music in particular ways. Some curricular goals include having students be able to describe or evaluate a piece of music, compare one piece of music to another, or respond to music by moving. When students are expected to speak or write about a piece of music they need to have a basic understanding of music terminology such as timbre, dynamics, and form. There are many websites and software programs that can help reinforce and improve students’ understanding of music vocabulary and listening skills. Some of the programs mentioned in the book include Music Ace for younger children, Teoria, and Musictheory.net. I have on occasion used the Musictheory.net website with my students to help reinforce what I am teaching and to give them an opportunity to practice a particular concept.

            I found it interesting that it mentions that students may lose interest and confidence in listening to music if the teachers’ main focus is on formalized listening and students are not given the opportunity to listen intuitively. Students enjoy listening to music more at home when it is intuitive and not structured by a teacher. This reminded me of a situation another teacher discussed with me about her daughter losing interest in reading. When the teacher described how they were reading at home I was able to figure out why her daughter no longer wanted to read with her parents. She told me that after each page the little girl read she would question her to see if she knew the meanings of all the difficult words and discuss other aspects of the story. This formalized reading and defining of words was taking away from the enjoyment of reading. For me, it would also disrupt the flow of the story. I told this to the teacher and I suggested that she let her daughter read through a story without stopping to quiz her. A few weeks later I asked if things had improved and she said that her daughter enjoyed reading again and looked forward to story time.

            Since I teach instrumental groups at school, I have my students listen to the original artists or a professional ensemble playing the songs that they are learning. I have students listen to and evaluate their own performances and make suggestions on ways to improve the ensemble. However, I have not included many listening examples beyond this. I have been striving to include world music in my curriculum, but when we are preparing for performances I feel that we don’t have the time to stop and do a listening activity. This year I scheduled the concerts early enough so that we will have a little over a month left of school after the concerts. During these weeks I am going to include activities that I normally feel that we don’t have time to do including listening activities. I am going to search online to find some listening maps or charts that will help my students focus on listening. Without these aids my students probably won’t know what to listen for and might lose focus on actively listening to a piece of music. Even though formalized listening is more difficult for students I think it is important to teach students how to listen beyond hearing or just intuitive listening. It will improve their understanding of music and their appreciation of all the different aspects that contribute to a piece of music. I agree with the author’s statement that a “primary goal of music listening activities should be to develop lifelong music listeners” (Bauer, 2014).

Reference:

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.