In the first episode of Season 2, Katrina Roush shows us how to examine our personal listening experiences, and discusses why this is an important mode of analysis..

This episode was produced by Katrina Roush and Jennifer Weaver with special thanks to Rachel Short, Rachel Mann, Students in Shenendoah Conservatory’s MUTC 225 class, Jennifer Beavers, Megan Lyons, David Thurmaier.

SMT-Pod Theme music by Zhangcheng Lu; Closing music "hnna" by David Voss. For supplementary materials on this episode and more information on our authors and composers, check out our website: https://smt-pod.org/episodes/season02/.

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[SMT-Pod opening theme music playing]

Welcome to SMT-Pod! The premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory. In this week's episode, Katrina Roush shows us how to examine our personal listening experiences, and discusses why this is an important mode of analysis.

Since we’re going to talk about listening in this episode, let’s begin by listening to a short passage from Corelli’s Christmas Concerto together.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso op. 6/8, I., first phrase playing]

How did that passage affect you? Did it affect you? Did you react to it? Did your thoughts change? Did your emotions change? Were there any changes in your physical body? Did you notice? Should you notice? What good would that do?

We’re going to explore some of these questions in this episode: how you are affected by your musical experiences, how to think about it and talk about it, and why this matters. You probably were affected by the music to some degree just now, even if you didn’t particularly notice. And the way each person experiences the passage, and the degree to which each one reacts, has the potential to vary quite a bit.

In fact, even though I know this piece very well – it’s one of my favorite classical works – I myself experience it differently depending on the exact situation I find myself in when hearing it. Just now, I confess, I didn’t react very strongly, because I wasn’t paying very close attention to the music. I was thinking about what I was about to say after it was over.

But when I was studying the passage in preparation for this episode, I paid very close attention to it over multiple hearings. There were times that I felt so closely connected with the passage that I felt each note almost as if it were coming from inside me. Sometimes my experience with this particular passage urges me to move my body, especially my head and my arms, or I feel like I want to close my eyes, to be somewhat separated from my physical reality and to fall into a different world created by Corelli.

And I always make a point to play this concerto on Christmas morning, since it is Corelli’s Christmas Concerto. Whenever I listen to it in that setting, surrounded by Christmas decorations while preparing dinner and sipping a cup of coffee with peppermint mocha creamer, it helps put me in a completely joyful and relaxed mood to enjoy my favorite holiday.

Now, if you were to listen to this on Christmas morning, although your experience might be similar to mine, it’s almost certain that it wouldn’t completely match mine – even if you were sipping the same coffee in my kitchen. And that’s because you’re not me. Your listening experiences will always be only yours. I can suggest that you listen in certain ways, and that might affect your reactions, but I can’t prescribe for you the exact way you hear music, the way you experience music.

I can’t fully describe your experiences, either. Only you can really do that. In this episode, I will propose that noticing, explaining, and valuing our personal listening experiences can offer a great deal of richness in our musical lives.

Of course, it can be really fun and interesting to compare experiences, to talk about what music does to us and to think about how that’s different for each person. But what’s the point? Why examine our own listening experiences? Well, this kind of analysis – and it is a kind of analysis – gets at a part of music that we don’t always talk about when we’re doing analytical work.

I think a lot of us are used to just analyzing pieces, and not the experience of pieces. But really, the experience is where music comes alive. For most people, music is worth something to them when they hear it and have some kind of emotional or cognitive response to it.

I do think that most music analysis has listening at its core, or at least connected to it, but this is usually in service of a goal of examining the structure and details of the piece. What I suggest is a shift to a different goal – that of uncovering and examining reactions in listeners.

These reactions are sometimes physical, and sometimes they’re mental or cognitive, but often, listeners’ reactions have an emotional component as well. I think all types of reactions are connected to each other, and they’re all worthy of examination and can lend us new insights – about ourselves, about the piece, and about each other.

Understanding yourself better is probably the most obvious of these. By thinking deeply about what you experience, you are getting in touch with an important aspect of who you are and how your mind and your emotions work.

And I have personally benefited from how analysis of experience has helped me understand musical works with more depth and appreciation. My experiential analyses often pull meaning from new interpretations of a piece that I had not considered using more traditional modes of analysis.

Sometimes, experience can inform and enhance other types of analysis, for example, by helping to make sense of ambiguous passages. Additionally, it can aid performers as they seek to understand how their role impacts the experience of a piece, and how they might be able to affect their audiences.

And understanding each other – for me, this is one of the most wonderful benefits of analyzing what I and others experience. When we share how we experience music with each other, we learn about each other. We can form a bond from this shared experience.

The piece draws us closer to each other, not just because we both heard it, but because we allowed ourselves to ponder our own reactions to it and to share those insights, which are really quite personal. Sharing musical experiences requires being vulnerable. Hearing someone else speak about their experiences encourages open-mindedness and builds connection. These exchanges can help us appreciate and respect diversity between listeners.

Right now, there are a lot of productive conversations about diversity taking place in music scholarship. When we talk about diversity, we generally talk about groups that people identify with – things like race, gender, ethnicity, culture, social status, level of education, and age. Diversity between listeners, in the way I am talking about here, is connected to this idea of similarity within various groups.

I am a white, American, middle-class woman in her 30s, who has been trained most of my life as a classical musician, and I have a Ph.D. in music. I would expect others who fall into these categories to experience music in fairly similar ways. Culture and background play into the way we experience music a lot.

But there are some distinct aspects of who I am and what I bring to music that are uniquely me, that other white, American, middle-class women wouldn’t bring to a musical experience. In this way, diversity between listeners is both about group identity and about individual identity. Our experiences may be similar, but they are not exactly the same. Both of these observations can prompt interesting conversations and comparisons.

When you stop to think about it, there are infinite combinations of factors that give each of us a unique identity, and this can even change slightly each time we listen to a musical work. We’re in different physical locations, different points in time, from different educational backgrounds. We have different musical preferences, different musical abilities, different moods, different levels of attention, and different expectations.

We have had different past experiences with music; we have different levels of familiarity with various composers, artists, styles, and genres. We are of different races, different ages, and different genders. We speak different languages. We’re from different parts of the world, and we hold dear different religious and cultural values.

We have diverse perspectives. Everything that makes you who you are also influences your musical experiences.

As I’ve been thinking about this analytical shift to focus on experience, I’ve come up with a personal philosophical definition of music. I believe that music lives in the intersection between piece and listener. In this definition, “the piece” refers to many different iterations of a musical example, such as a score, a recording, or even the actual sounds produced by musicians – but this isn’t really music until it becomes someone’s personal experience.

It needs to pass through a listener’s mind, and their individuality as a person, and their particular situation at that point in time. This “passing through” is what I’ll refer to in this episode as mediation: the process by which listeners filter musical sounds through their own unique situations to create a unique musical experience.

For example, when I’m listening to Corelli’s Christmas Concerto on Christmas morning, “the piece” is the recording that I’ve chosen, the score from which the musicians are playing, and the sound coming out of the speakers. I then mediate this through my Christmasy surroundings – sights, smells, tastes – and my own personal state at that moment – including my emotions, memories, attitude, and the like – and I get from this, music – a unique musical experience.

If it is true that music only really exists when it is experienced, then mediation is essential to the existence of music. How else would music come about, if not mediated through a listener? So then, listeners, and the situations that they’re in, are also essential to the existence of music. Since listeners, listening situations, experiences, and mediation are crucial components of music, then they should have a place in the analysis of that music.

Again, musical sounds are just that – sounds. Only when they are mediated by a listener do they become music. This might sound like a radical shift from the way we’re used to thinking and talking about pieces and listening, but I think it’s actually a very natural one. It feels like it coincides with how I interact with music, and it allows me to be an important part of the complex nature of what music is.

This is why this stuff is particularly fascinating to me, because I feel like it explains something about my relationship to music that a lot of analysis just doesn’t address. When I listen to music, I feel like I’m a part of something, not just a passive receiver of sound. That’s because music is not just affecting me; I’m taking part in actually creating it. I think there’s something so deep and beautiful about acknowledging that we are essential to music.

If you can, think back to that first listening example at the beginning of the episode. We all had different experiences with it because we are all different listeners in different situations.

Now listen to that passage again. This time, focus on hearing articulation and accent – the passage begins somewhat sharp and crisp, and gives way to more connected, smoother notes at the end. Direct your attention to this on purpose, and try to notice any kinds of reactions in your mental, emotional, and physical state.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in G Minor, op. 6/8, I. Vivace – Grave playing]

How did that passage affect you? Did it affect you? Did you react to it? Did your thoughts change? Did your emotions change? Were there any changes in your physical body?

If you were able to notice something about your first experience with this passage at the beginning of the episode, was this second experience different at all? Well, based on the way I’ve defined music and the way I think about experience, and given that we are dynamic beings, always changing, and we live in dynamic environments that are always changing, the answer to this would always be yes.

If nothing else, you very likely mediated the first experience unintentionally, but the second experience at least partially in a specific way, on purpose. And the different ways you mediated the passage at different times would change the way you experienced it, even if only slightly.

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My two experiences were noticeably different, and I can recognize that especially when I think about how I mediated them. The first time, I mediated the experience through a more scattered mental state, less attention to what I was hearing, and a little more apathy towards the experience.

But this time, I did what I asked you to do – I mediated my experience through specific focus on the slight shift in articulation in the passage. Because of this focus, I also mediated the experience through intense attention to the piece, through an expectation of a change in articulation, and honestly, through a sense of community.

This might sound weird, but I knew that you would be listening with a similar focus, and this communal purpose helped mediate my experience. I wasn’t really expecting that. I don’t think I would have identified it, either, without specifically reflecting on my experience and putting it into words.

Due to the particular way I mediated this second experience of the passage, I felt a type of intimacy with the piece by allowing myself to get lost in my experience of it. I felt an increase in my mood when I was able to successfully aurally identify the point in the excerpt when the articulation changed. I felt connection with you, as we listened to the same passage with a similar focus.

These three aspects of experience had never collided quite in this way for me before hearing the passage just now, even though I’ve probably listened to it over 100 times. Although there are aspects of myself that were the same every time I’ve heard the passage, such as my cultural background, my gender, my race, and my ethnicity, I mediate each musical experience through a different situation, and this makes each experience, while somewhat similar, also somewhat unique.

You may also have shared some of my reactions to the piece, and you may have mediated your experience in similar ways. There were also likely some differences. All of this could contribute to a meaningful and fruitful exchange as we seek to understand ourselves, the piece, and each other better.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in F Major, op. 6/6, II. Allegro playing]

You might have noticed that the clips we’ve heard in this episode so far are by Arcangelo Corelli. In fact, all the examples in this episode are his. There are a few reasons I’ve chosen to do this, not just because I love his style, which I do, but because I wanted to put some limits on the musical examples as we begin practicing a new analytical method.

Using only works by Corelli will simplify our discussion of the analytical method without bringing up too many questions of stylistic differences. Of course, composer and style and genre and time period of a piece all can play a part in our experiences, and it’s worth exploring these further once you feel comfortable with this method.

When choosing a composer with simplicity in mind, Corelli made sense to me because of the short length of his pieces and his limited genres. Corelli’s compositions generally have movements that are only a few minutes long, if that. Short examples are easiest as you get used to analyzing what you experience in real time, giving plenty of natural places to pause and reflect without interrupting a movement. And the simplicity of timbre, form, and musical gestures in Corelli’s style helps reduce the chance of becoming overwhelmed with too many things to discuss at once.

Another particular aspect of Corelli’s compositions is that they are all instrumental; there’s no text or other extramusical associations immediately apparent while listening to the works, further aiding in simplicity.

These are all reasons that Corelli’s compositions work well when learning to identify and verbalize your experiences, how you mediate those experiences, and how this creates music for you. However, there’s no reason this same analytical method can’t be applied to literally any musical experience. And by doing so, you might find another layer of yourself as a listener, prompted by differences between styles and composers, and by reflecting on your experiences of both music and text in vocal works.

The goal is to first get comfortable with reflecting on yourself and identifying how you mediate aspects of a piece to help create music. Then, do it with all kinds of pieces and musical experiences and enjoy the variety of insights you gain!

Let me walk you through an example of how I might reflect on my own experience with a piece as I’m hearing it, and what insights I might draw from it. This is from the fifth movement of Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in G Minor, op. 6/8, V. Allegro playing]

[Spoken over musical example:]

I feel a steadiness.

I think this is because of the consistency of meter, as well as repetitive aspects of this section.

I’ve started tapping my foot along with this – not on every beat, but on beats that feel stronger, which I believe is helping me group measures together in a consistent pattern.

[Spoken over musical example:]

Oh – I felt unsteady there. Something, something made me feel unsteady. I could still tap my foot, but something didn’t feel quite right.

And I feel motion. It feels like it’s pushing to me. I’m still tapping my foot, but my foot feels tense. I physically feel more tension than I did at the beginning.

This I recognize as being a repetition.

Okay, coming up is the part where I felt unsteady before… Ah, I didn’t feel as unsteady that time.

Here, I feel a lot more motion again. I feel driven forward.

[After music is over:]

I’m going to reflect now on my experiences I described while the movement was playing and think about how I mediated them.

I have a lot of energy pent up in my body today, more so than usual. So I was apt to actually literally move, not just feel motion coming from the piece, but actually move my own body. I believe my energetic state helped to mediate this experience. It pushed me to tap my foot, and it created more urgency at the end, when the piece wasn’t faster, but in some ways felt (quote-unquote) “faster” to me, or at least it had a sense of forward motion.

There were definitely some aspects of the piece that were changing at times when I was feeling something different. As I was listening, I found myself counting along, not with the beat, but actually counting groups of measures. There was a regularly at the beginning of the movement that allowed me to feel 4-measure groups consistently.

This abruptly changed to a 3-measure group in the second half of the movement, and this is where I felt unsteady. Now, this is an aspect of the piece, but there’s something about me that made this stand out. The reason I felt specifically reactionary to that event, I believe, is because of my experience with classical music and the expectations I’ve built up for tonal pieces of this time period – that they will generally establish a regular grouping of measures and stick to that throughout the work.

If you have an educational background that’s similar to mine, or even if you just listen to a lot of tonal classical music, you might have had a similar experience of disruption here, even if you didn’t necessarily realize why. If you don’t have a lot of experience with music of this style, or perhaps if you were focusing intently on something else, you may not have felt a disruption at all.

I find that I really like pieces that maintain a regularity of grouping measures together, but I also like music that doesn’t do that, specifically because it goes against the grain of my expectations. I mediated my experience with this example through my sensitivity to and expectation for this phenomenon.

The second time I heard this grouping irregularity, on the repeat, it didn’t stand out to me or unsettle me in the same way because I was 100% expecting it to sound like it did before. I could hear that the section was repeating, and my recognition of this mediated my experience differently the second time, creating different feelings for me.

Now, I purposefully didn’t use a lot of sophisticated musical jargon to explain what I just experienced. I wanted to demonstrate that one of the nice things about analyzing our own experiences is that you don’t need to be a music scholar to do it. Literally anyone can talk about how music makes them feel or what kinds of reactions they experience while listening. Just ask anyone the day after attending a concert of their favorite band.

Of course, more academic musical knowledge can help put terminology to certain things, and it’s very helpful when identifying musical reasons for parts of your experience. But no musical training is required for this type of analysis, and having musical training doesn’t necessarily allow for deeper or more interesting insights. In any case, explaining our experiences isn’t really a skill that we learn in music school anyway, but it is one that can get easier and more refined with practice.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in C Minor, op. 6/3, V. Allegro playing]

Now you try. This is the second movement of Corelli’s Concerto Grosso number 7. If you’re in a place where you can, consider jotting down some thoughts, or recording yourself talking them out as you listen, as I just did – or, if you can’t, just reflect on your participation as a listener.

How does the example make you feel? What does it make you think about? What kind of experience are you having? Then think about why. How are you mediating that feeling or experience? What is it about you or your situation that is prompting your particular reaction? How are you creating music for yourself? Try not to guide yourself into a certain experience. Just let your body, mind, and emotions be free, and observe what happens.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in D Major, op. 6/7, II. Adagio playing]

Now that you’ve identified different aspects of your experience that stood out to you, examine what influenced them. Some of your influences might be traced back to the piece – that is, something about the compositional makeup of the work or the performance on this particular recording – in other words, what we traditionally refer to as “analysis.”

This is where some musical education can be helpful, especially depending on how deep you want to dig or what methods you could apply to help explain your experience, although you don’t necessarily need the terminology to identify aspects of a piece that affect you, especially on the surface. After all, saying “it got louder” is the same as saying “there was an increase in dynamics,” and “a return to the A section” can just as easily be described as “I heard the stuff from the beginning of the piece again.”

Don’t just stop there, identifying how the piece influenced your experience. After all, many of us already approach more traditional analysis by first listening to something and noticing interesting parts of a piece that stand out, and then looking back to what the piece is doing to create those interesting parts.

To analyze your experience more fully, the next step is to identify those influences that fall outside the piece. What is it about you and your particular situation right now that caused this unique experience – in other words, how did you mediate the experience? I can’t tell you what the answer to that might be, but some places you might start to examine are your mood, how you’re feeling physically, where you directed your attention and the intensity of that attention, your expectations (musical or otherwise), your level of familiarity with Corelli’s style, your level of enjoyment of the piece or of this exercise, and, to be fair, how strongly you buy into the idea that this type of analysis could be useful for you personally.

So, you’ve put into words your experience with this excerpt, and identified some reasons why you had this specific experience. Where do we go from here? Well, to really dive into the analytical applications and ramifications of this type of analysis would probably take a whole other episode. So just remember where we started: if music only exists when it is mediated by a listener, analysis of experience is truly analysis of music. And it can help you learn more about yourself, about the piece, and about others.

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in F Major, op. 6/2, IV. Allegro playing]

As I said earlier, I think it’s fascinating and, frankly, essential to think about the diversity of listening experiences that people have. All we’ve really had time to discuss today is how to reflect on our own personal experiences. But this is a great first step to begin thinking about incorporating experience and mediation in analysis in more general terms.

The more we learn how to analyze our own listening, the more we can be sensitive to others’ particular listening experiences. Once you’re comfortable with these conversations with other listeners, you can even talk about possible or hypothetical experiences and how they might be mediated, to demonstrate the various ways certain pieces could become music for different people.

As you get better at explaining your own experiences and understanding why you have them, you will find that thinking about the plurality of experiences that are out there and understanding their value comes more easily. You might even find that you develop a wider range of experiences as you hear about others’. The act of recognizing and valuing experiences that are different from your own—or even the same as yours—can become another tool of mediation for your musical experiences in the future, teaching you new things about yourself, about pieces, and about each other.

Like Aristotle said, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Learn to examine your own listening experiences and understand your role in them, and this will broaden your acceptance of others’ differing perspectives and deepen your appreciation of the pieces you hear. Ever since I embarked on this journey myself, I have found it to be an incredibly enriching path to be on.

Thank you so much for listening with me today!

[Corelli, Concerto Grosso in G Minor, op. 6/8, VI. Pastorale ad libitum. Largo playing]

[Spoken over musical example:] I want to thank my wonderful peer reviewer Joe Straus for the insightful advice he offered during the creation of this episode, as well as his support of my work in general. I am also grateful for the helpful feedback I received from Rachel Short and Rachel Mann, as well as the students of Shenandoah Conservatory's MUTC 225 class in Fall 2022, who helped me workshop some of these ideas. To Jen Weaver, Megan Lyons, Jenny Beavers, David Thurmaier, and the rest of the SMT-Pod team. You guys are amazing! Thank you for all of the important work that you're doing. And a special shoutout to Anthony Marasco who taught me most of what I know about audio recording and production.

[Spoken over closing music:] Visit our website smt-pod.org for supplemental materials related to this episode and to learn how to submit an episode proposal. Join in on the conversation by tweeting your questions and comments @SMT_Pod. SMT Pod's theme music was written by Zhangcheng Lu with closing music by David Voss. Thanks for listening!