In school as a kid, we had classes called music appreciation. I’m pretty sure such classes have been around for many decades and extend from the youngest grades to college. They are designed to give students a working knowledge of the history of music. They invariably end up valorizing Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and probably Bernstein. The goal was to get us to like them.
Sadly the kids mostly sit there bored or otherwise marveling at the incomprehensible enthusiasm of the teacher. I’m not sure this works. There are better ways to go about this.
The point of music appreciation was to inspire students with a working knowledge of what is called classical music, to formulate a story of progress from primitive to advanced, and thus to underscore the great theme of many generations that everything in history has moved in one direction mainly: always better.
In pursuit of this task, the classes usually begin with Gregorian chant. The idea is that these were building blocks, just one note at a time, with a dark and dreary text befitting the Dark Ages. As matters brightened, the story goes, the music became more complex with organum (following the 10th century), which deployed two and three pitches, leading straight to the 15th and 16th centuries, which revealed ever more complexities. Bach is then treated as the great breakthrough from the age of faith to something different.
It so happens that I no longer believe this story. Gregorian chant itself contains its own mastery of economy, fitting vast text into a model of presentation on which there has never been any improvement. In fact, if I may dabble in heresy here, and despite my aesthetic dislike of most modern music, the genre today that has most in common in structure and textual intent is rap. Not to my taste, but I’m making a point here: Psalm singing and rap both elevate the text within a musical model emphasizing storytelling over composition.
As for polyphony of the Renaissance, it has elements of complexity and richness that were culled in later centuries. The Baroque forced all music into major and minor keys with accidentals along the way. The reason for this had to do with the use of printed music and the need to standardize for a range of instruments. But music itself lost many wonderful features with the shift from eight modes to two. The modes did not really return in any popular frameworks until the late 1950s, with post-bop jazz.
The point I’m making here is that the trajectory is not as clean and clear as people might imagine. Listen to the complicated motets of Josquin des Prez or Thomas Tallis, and compare with most any music now, and the claim becomes evident. There is great and bad music in every age, so a story of progress onward and upward doesn’t really get at the core of the issue.
The other problem with this approach is that mere listening is too abstract to gain heartfelt appreciation. Sounds on speakers in a classroom are not music but sound; music is part of life experience, a soundtrack to real life.
As an example, I once found myself alone in a cathedral, and the music of the day was the “Messa de Nostre Dame” by Guillaume Machaut, written in 1365. I did not know this then, and I could not place whether the composition was ancient or modern. Quite frankly, the experience was mind-blowing and uplifting to the spirit in ways I cannot describe. That will forever be the context in which I understand this piece.
Think of the popular music of your high school years, the stuff on the radio, the songs you shared with your friends, the music that played at parties, and so on. You hear this now, and your mind returns mostly to the social context in which you got to know this music.
That is the source of its power, not the notes or words as such.
It’s this way with all music. It’s why concert halls go out of their way to create a huge impression with their decor or lighting. The goal is to grant the listener a framework of experience.
Without this framework, the music itself is too much of an abstraction. This is why when you stumble on the Met Opera show on the radio, it does not mean that much to you. It all sounds the same. As they say, you have to be there. Attend one opera by Verdi or Rossini, and suddenly the music takes on an entirely new meaning. Then and only then does the mind and heart mix well with the sounds to create a mental picture of the meaning of it all.
It’s this way with all music. It cannot be taken out of its social context and mean the same thing. This is why most concert venues have learned to offer little lectures and talks before the concert to explain the composer, the meaning, the purpose, and so on, so that way when the listener encounters a symphony by Schubert or a concerto by Haydn, there will be some preparatory context in which to understand the piece.
What is the right way to gain real knowledge of music without formal study? I like to recommend film scores, ideally good ones. If your kids or grandkids love a movie, encourage them to listen to the soundtrack. It can be “Frozen” or “Gladiator” or “Star Wars” or “Wicked.” It doesn’t matter. What matters is they have now a mental understanding of the music and the story it tells.
Some of the most brilliant Disney projects are the Fantasia movies. They take great classical music and add animation to them so that the sounds tell a great story. This is how we associated Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with music by French composer Paul Dukas. The sounds and the images will be forever tied together. The same is true of other pieces in the 1940 movie, such as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.
Not all music needs a story, but this is an excellent beginning for genuine music appreciation. Perhaps the most famous example is Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” arguably the most famous example of all of programmatic music. Another might be “Music for the Royal Fireworks” by Handel. Once a person gets the hang of this, he can develop skills of inventing stories himself without the aid of a storyteller or opera or animation.
It always strikes me that the great age of the grand symphony, which arguably lasted a little more than a century, from 1800 to the Great War, represents the true culmination of musical sophistication, precisely because they tended to be numbered rather than named. It was left to the audience to figure out the rest.
Gustav Mahler very famously refused to provide any program notes precisely because he did not want his music characterized or prejudged to mean a precise thing but rather to be offered to the individual human imagination to fill in the blanks. That said, popular culture of course assigned names to them despite his protests: Titan (1), Resurrection (2), Tragic (6), Symphony of a Thousand (8), and so on. Not even Mahler could stop his music from becoming programmatic.
As much as I admire Mahler’s heightened idealism, there is simply no separation between the sounds of music (speaking of great soundtracks!) and the social and personal context in which the music is experienced. If the only context is a classroom and a speaker, there will be no real gain of any appreciation of what drives music to be what it is.
Genuine musical appreciation is not a one-time course but a lifetime vocation and journey. It never stops. We are blessed these days to have access to vast amounts of it in all styles from all countries and traditions from all ages, right there at our fingertips with streaming services.
This is glorious, but compare it with a 19th-century household with a music room and a single piano and singer from within the family or neighborhood. Those were meaningful experiences too, precisely because of the setting and community feeling they inspired.
The path to real music appreciation lies not in pedagogy and didacticism but in the ways in which music can become the soundtrack of a life well-lived.
