On 31 Mar 2006 at 18:57, Darcy James Argue wrote: > On 31 Mar 2006, at 6:40 PM, David W. Fenton wrote: > > > When teaching my "pre-theory" class I have done a weekly project > > where students bring in a recording of a piece of music they > > particularly like. They have to talk about the piece before it's > > played, describing what's going on musically, then we listen, then > > the rest of the class talks about it i musical terms. > > > > Two main things have surprised me: > > > > 1. they ignore lyrics > > Ah, but they're music majors, right? . . .
No. The class is a *pre-theory* class for people with no musical training at all. > . . . Classically trained musicians > (including singers) are *terrible* about listening to lyrics. I > include myself in this category, as I've only started paying > attention to lyrics within the past 3-4 years, and even then, they > are rarely the first thing that grabs my attention. Well, that may be true, but it's not applicable to this student population. For me it was a surprise because when I was their age, we studied pop music lyrics studiously to try to figure out what the songs were about. And that included while I was in conservatory, which rather goes against your point above. > Non-musicians who are serious about music, however (what Bill Evans > called "the sensitive layman") listen *primarily* to lyrics -- at > least, in my experience. My girlfriend, for instance, will not listen > to a song unless the lyrics grab her. It's only after several listens > that she starts to pay attention to the music at all. In almost all cases, these students couldn't tell me what the lyrics were about for music that they had chosen as being music they *love*. I was appalled by this. Part of it, though, was an inability to articulate what they felt about it, as much as it was a failure to comprehend. That was the point of the exercise, to teach them to talk about music descriptively using words, so I certainly didn't consider it a flaw of the assignment -- it was the point, i.e., to bring out the areas in which they needed to learn out to convert their feelings into something articulate and descriptive. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
