Students may be familiar with a piece, and may even know it well, but have they thought about it? Active listening, therefore, is a useful tool in both music courses and non-music courses, and can have the democratizing effect of leveling the playing field. Even students with years of performance training may struggle when it comes to talking about music or making salient observations about what they hear. Whether employed in music courses or in non-music courses, active listening does not require advanced musical training or the ability to read music, yet it can still be used with students who can read music. ![]() ![]() In other words, active listening is listening with a purpose. If active learning is generally understood as any pedagogical approach that engages students in the learning process and requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing in the context of the classroom, then active listening similarly requires students to engage with and think about what they hear. So what is “active listening” and how can we encourage and facilitate it when using musical examples in undergraduate courses? However, while active learning is a frequent topic of discussion in pedagogical circles today, the notion of active listening is rarely addressed-if at all. Even the best-prepared activities can miss the mark, however, unless students are prepared to listen and not just to hear. In order to make effective use of the music made available via these resources, we must train our students how to engage with it. Many university libraries are purchasing subscriptions to online streaming databases and supporting initiatives to catalogue and archive their multimedia collections, thus providing access to a rapidly diversifying treasure-trove of newly available resources for use in undergraduate courses. An Art History course on Impressionism might examine various musical compositions in conjunction with visual works of art of the same period, comparing Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau with Claude Monet’s Water Lilies to better understand the principles and markers of the impressionist movement as expressed in various media. A class on Shakespeare’s Othello, for example, might feature a musical excerpt from Giuseppe Verdi’s 1887 operatic setting of the play. An English course might examine how particular texts have been set to music, or how canonical theatrical works have been adapted for the operatic stage. For example, an American History course on the 1960s could feature iconic protest songs of the anti-war movement or a comparison of Aretha Franklin’s Respect from 1967 with Otis Redding’s original 1965 recording in order to highlight prevalent issues of class and gender in the United States at that time. Musical examples can be usefully deployed in a wide variety of disciplines. By expanding the notion of a “text” to include any object that can communicate meaning-as in the literary theory sense of the word-then music can also be treated as an important object of study from a variety of vantage points. ![]() But music is not just for musicians and music courses. While the importance of teaching with a variety of artifacts or objects is generally recognized, music may not always be the first port of call outside of music classes. To practice active listening, we must-like Dr. Nevertheless, music has the power to enrich student engagement in the college classroom if they learn the art of active listening and how to connect what they hear with a broader conceptual network. Music surrounds us everyday-it is on our playlists, the radio, commercials, soundtracks for movies or television shows, our neighbors’ stereo-yet we seem to have mastered the art of hearing without listening. In these parallel statements, the implication is that “seeing” and “hearing” are passive, while “observing” and “listening” are active, requiring a heightened level of engagement from the observer or listener but also resulting in a greater acquisition of knowledge. Watson can be rephrased to reference the ear rather than the eye as the sensory organ of observation: You hear, but you do not listen. By Christy Thomas You see, but you do not observe.
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