Reading Task 5

What is the difference between active perceptive listening and passive functional listening? What are three techniques to enhance active listening?
How might a teacher respond to older elementary children’s requests to bring pop music recordings to music class?

Passive functional listening is what we do when we turn some music on to use as background noise. It serves the function of drowning out other noises and keeping our minds from wandering to topics other than those at hands. While studying, writing, or even trying to sleep we often turn on music to provide background noise, and this is passive functional listening. Active perceptive listening, however, is essentially listening specifically and intently to the music itself. This also includes “deep listening,” which involves listening for specific musical characteristics – tonalities, timbres, form, intonation, and so forth. Active perceptive listening is the best way to truly learn pieces of music as well as grow an appreciation for music.

Three techniques to enhance active perceptive listening include the following. Attentive Listening uses diagrams to focus the students’ attention on the music and specific qualities therein. Engaged Listening, then, occurs when the students are actively involved, almost always physically, in the music and learning about it. This can include tapping their feet, patting the beat, and singing a melody, and helps them identify and then perform specific rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic concepts in the music. Lastly, Enactive Listening deeply engages the student; it requires them to repeatedly listen to the piece, internalize it, and be able to perform it in style or reflect on its nuances. This is definitely most appropriate for middle school students and older.

I would suggest that a music teacher might look favorably upon a student’s request to bring in a pop music recording. While music teachers would not normally use pop music, it is unfair to say that all popular music is “not real music,” as many would have their students believe. Pop music often still includes such musical concepts as form, timbre, rhythm, and certainly lyric-related issues as well (context, etc.). As a music teacher I would not allow my students to bring in their own music very often, but I would welcome the opportunity. Of course, I would have them bring it in before school that day or even on an earlier day so I could have a chance to listen to it first, to check first of all for school-appropriateness as well as to just get a feel for how I could best use it. But I do not think that the blanket answer should be “no.”

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