How To Listen to Music
How To Listen To Music is here to help you deepen your relationship to yourself and to culture by training you hear music.
Music is one of the most layered and complex forms of cultural expression that we have. A single song can contain a multitude of historical, technical, intellectual, cultural and emotional messages that impact us even when we don’t understand how or why. As we consume more music as a society, the ability to really hear and understand music can give us many advantages.
As individuals, we can find more to like in music thus increasing the pleasure we get in listening and sharing with others. We can also begin to understand our whole selves through understanding our tastes, potentially adding listening to our toolbox for personal growth.
As a culture, deeper listening can initiate conversations about how music affects our collective imagination, mental health, and sense of history and community with higher regard to the craft and performance of music itself. Learning to hear is ultimately a journey to self that helps us squeeze more joy out of life and find our orientation in our shared cultural landscape.
How to Listen to Music is designed to help you learn to hear. Once every two weeks, we investigate an album, artist, or work, of some historical import from a historical, technological, lyrical, and musical perspective. In doing so we learn how to hear various genres and eras of cultural expression, gain a sense of the commonalities and differences between them, and ultimately find resonances within ourselves. I hope to show you How To Listen To Music soon!
The next gathering on 5/12 is our second investigation into the work of Quincy Jones, with a look at Frank Sinatra’s “Sinatra at the Sands”.