Although I enjoy listening to music, my musical knowledge is nearly nonexistent–I can’t recognize chords or specific notes, much less read sheet music. So when I’m reading writing on music, especially in classical or jazz music, a lot of it goes over my head. If you have a good degree of musical knowledge, how does it effect your appreciation of music? Can you finally understand and enjoy music you couldn’t in the past? For that matter, does music you enjoy before not seem as good?
Learning definitely affects our enjoyment, though it needn’t be formal study.
Let me clarify that. The music we grow up listening to, we tend to enjoy; our minds learn to comprehend it, and differentiate a lot of subtleties that we may not even be conscious of. This without any schooling.
When presented with a different form of music, we have little comprehension, and many of us don’t find the experience rewarding. As Branford Marsalis put it, “We don’t know what we like, we like what we know.”
As a kid growing up with rock and roll in a fairly unmusical household, it took me a while to appreciate jazz. Over the years, I’ve learned to love more and more of it, but there are still a number of sub-genres that require more musical sophistication to appreciate. I know that’s the reason because I know people who are more “educated” (regardless of whether it’s formal or informal learning) who not only can appreciate these more abstruse forms, they can often point out elements to me that help me understand it better. In particular, much of jazz plays with the listener’s expectations, dancing around a well-known melody rather than playing it, but if you don’t know that melody, you’re not hearing the difference between your expectations and what the musician is doing.
I’m a self-taught musician. When I hear music, I can tell what each instrument is playing, despite often not being able to make out quite what people are saying in movies in TV. (My point is, my hearing isn’t great, but my comprehension is good.) When the music is within my understanding of theory (and again, here, it’s not important whether that understanding is related to a nomenclature like formal study would produce, or is an informal understanding), I could quickly identify the specific notes or chords and even the chord voicings (there are lots of ways to play a given chord, and they all sound a bit different, imparting nuance).
If the composition is over my head, I can still appreciate it: I can hear the tension of building dissonance and feel satisfied with the release of harmonic resolution. You may not know what those terms mean specifically, but I bet if played any number of songs that have obvious examples, you’d identify it right away, based on the nontechnical meanings of the words. But for the stuff over my head, I wouldn’t quite know how the effect was achieved. I could work it out, slowly, and if it’s “just” over my head, learn a lesson.
Often, learning how a song achieves its thematic goals increases my appreciation. In particular, I seem to like Paul Simon songs better the more I study them (often, finding out that things that sounded simple or similar in different verses are actually subtle variations and more ingenious than I would have guessed). Other times (but more rarely), I’m disappointed when I learn a tune, oddly enough. “Take The Long Way Home” by Supertramp is an interesting example. It’s a great song, but when I sat down to learn it I was actually disheartened by how simple it was, and never enjoyed playing it. Over the years I’ve learned to enjoy it again, but I don’t bother trying to play it. (That said, there are blindingly simple songs I enjoy playing. Heck, I play a lot of blues, which is easier than music. I don’t know what it was about that song that disappointed me.)
My mother once told me that any subject gets more interesting the more you know about it. She was right. So far, about the only counterexample to that I’ve found was kidney stones. I’d be delighted never to learn another thing about the joy of passing stones.
That said, it’s definitely possible to appreciate without understanding, and to learn to appreciate more without doing the hard work of learning the technical details.
I can’t listen to any music without mentally analyzing it – harmony, instrumentation, arrangement, other. I also find myself comparing a composition with others I know about. There’s always something in common with something else. Sometimes I enjoy how a well-known song is presented differently. Sometimes I recall working on the song in a recording studio or performance, or a way I once played it, or personal interaction with the composer on rare occasions. It’s common for me to hear a song I was peripherally involved with long ago being played on the supermarket ceiling.
Some might say this destroys the beauty of the work, but I don’t agree.
Purely my own opinions -
I don’t believe musical knowledge is necessary for the appreciation of music. I do, however, believe that the more you know about music, and the more you know about music history, the more you will appreciate the music that you already know, and the more you will appreciate music that you are hearing or playing for the first time.
It has also been my experience that an appreciation for music leads to a thirst for knowledge about it. Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ was an album that completely changed my life at age 11 when I got it for Christmas in 1973. I must have listened to it at least once a day the next year; I had to learn more about what music was ‘like’ this. Who was Viv Stanshall? Who were Mike Oldfield’s influences, and what did there music sound like? Could I figure out how to play some of it by ear? It wasn’t much longer before I was spending every cent I had on albums and music books…
And I heartily agree with Musicat - my love of music has only ever been enhanced by learning more about it.
I’m also a self-taught guitarist/singer/songwriter. I can’t really read music notation in any functional sense…it would take me an hour or more to read a line or two of music off a page and I’d still be wondering if I’ve interpeted it correctly. Having said that, years of playing and writing music have affected the way I hear music.
I’ve gone through stages of musical preferences that are informed by own music-making and I’m really not sure if these preferences would play out in the same manner if I had not become a musician. For example, when I first started playing guitar I immersed myself deeply in a kind of ‘jam-like’ music. An example might be the long jamming in Pink Floyd’s Echoes or Miles Davis’ Right Off. Just lots of extended grooving, often on a single chord. I tended to shun song forms with chordal movement. Over time this reversed itself as I became a songwriter, my focus turned to chordal movement and song structure and my interest in jamming waned.
I also think the trajectory of my efforts as a musician have also led me to appreciate music I might’ve ignored otherwise. I’ve never been a rootsy/folk/blues/country guy but that has changed over time, accelerated by wanting to learn more of the guitar playing in those genres. My interest in trying to improve my singing led to a better appreciation of opera.
For Classical, I would be wary about delving into the technical aspects of composition or even form and structure… it’s ok to do that, but just enjoying the music with your right brain is the most important thing - you don’t need your left brain nattering about academia and ruining everything.
However, I think it’s important to know the main historical divisions of classical music, and the important composers in each of those. Start here.
I was just talking to a musician friend about that. I don’t grok the circle of chords. I can’t tell E-flat major from F-sharp minor. Or whatever.
Someone on another SDMB thread had to explain why 3:4 time is different from 6:8 time. (I mean, 3/4 is the same as 6/8, right?)
But, man, I love my Vivaldi, my Telemann, my Couperin, my Prokofiev. Give me an hour of Saint-Saens, and I am happy.
I know people who have violent opinions in the “original instruments” vs. “modern instruments” debate. Y’know, I love 'em both. They’re different, but why one would be better than another, I could never say. I like “all brass” rearrangements of works. I have an album of Vivaldi for Japanese Koto Strings. Elegant!
I don’t comprehend minimalism, and atonalism, and modern stuff. I get nothing from Scriabn.
So… I listen to the stuff I love. Ignorance can be bliss.
Music is a vital part of my life, having worked as a sound engineer since I was a teen, and currently working shooting concert video. But I have no technical knowledge of music, and react to it entirely on an emotional level.
But I do have a very high level of technical knowledge in other areas, and I have to confess, it has impacted my ability to appreciate those thing in the same way that someone without this knowledge. For instance, I’ve been working in video nearly as long, and it is hard for me to just watch TV without looking at the image critically - looking at MPEG artifacts, etc.
There are things that, once you become aware of them, you can never lose that awareness. Kerning, for instance. Once you learn how text should be kerned, you will always, I mean always, notice it.
I fear that obtaining an equal technical level of musical knowledge will have the same deleterious impact on my enjoyment.
One of my favorite pieces of music is Dylan’s Visions of Johanna (from Blonde on Blonde)…a real masterpiece IMO. Yet at the same time it’s a poke in the eye listening to the bass player (and maybe some of the other band members) struggling to keep up with the chord changes. It takes me ‘out’ of the experience of just enjoying the music. (Dylan was pretty notorious for not really leading his musicians properly through a song.) I’m not sure if non-musicians are affected in the same way.
I wouldn’t know theory if it bit me on the ass, but playing music encouraged me to listen carefully and isolate parts. I remember when I was maybe 16 and figuring out Sunshine of Your Love - the guitar riff was cool, but when I realized it was the Tom-Tom beat of the drums that made the song, I knew I was listening better (it was one of the best musical moments of my life 20 years later to hear the guy that engineered that song, Tom Dowd, in the essential documentary of his life, explain that Cream couldn’t pull the song together in the studio, so he suggested that Ginger Baker try a Tom beat and it all clicked - I was right!!).
I write about music on the Dope pretty regularly and get nice comments, perhaps because I don’t know theory so have to find more non-jargon words to explain what I hear going on…
It’s kind of like magic.
If you know how magic tricks are done, then watching an ‘average’ or ‘good’ magician isn’t very entertaining. But a great magician will blow you away. However an untrained person may enjoy both acts equally or even like a good magician better than a great because they don’t see just how impossibly difficult something is.
So some training may make you enjoy some stuff less but appreciate some stuff more. I don’t listing it often but atonal music is really impressive to me. The ability to divorce yourself from tonality and come up with something that, strange as it may be, is “good”. But I honestly don’t think I get more out of Bach than anyone who is untrained. Actually I think art should be appreciated by those who are untrained and if it can’t be, well, it is a failure on some level.
^^This.
I read music, have taken several classes in music, and can/could play several instruments back in the day. But my appreciation of music is seperate from that knowledge.
Brilliant analogy.
I’m a musical ignoramus. I wasn’t exposed to much good music or information about music when I was young, and hearing is not my way of comprehending the world. I couldn’t even distinguish different musical instruments or voices when I listened to music.
I only knew if it evoked an emotional response or not.
Learning about music has increased my enjoyment of it tremendously. I got a lecture series that began with the basics, the sound of each individual instrument in an orchestra, and went on from there. I still don’t really “get” the circle of fifths or other technical aspects, but I hear things in music I never heard before, and enjoy it far more.
So yes, in my case, even a small amount of education vastly increased my enjoyment and appreciation.