The Listening Child (Reflection on Ch. 9)

p. 224 "Music, in many ways, is a thread connecting the different periods of one's life, marking special moments... music [people] associate with certain times or events may continue to appeal to them throughout a lifetime."

I really struggled with feeling homesick my freshman year of college... after a really difficult fall semester, spring semester bordered on feeling impossible much of the time. Music really helped me get through that feeling - specifically, listening to jazz. My dad's been playing jazz guitar since he was 16, and for as long as I can remember, that's most of what my family listens to when we have music playing during dinner, parties, or just everyday music. I've also been hearing my dad play since I was born, and I can sing you most of the songs he can play. I brought Oscar Peterson, Vince Guiraldi, and Nat King Cole CDs back to school with me, and in a way brought a big feeling of family and home along with that. Music's capability to comfort, inspire, excite, etc. is something that I think is really important to stress to students - often we spend so much time talking about what the music itself sounds like we forget to talk about how it makes us feel, which is a HUGE part of experiencing music for every person, and for many of us, why we enjoy it so much in the first place.

p. 229-231 "Deep-Listening"

This semester I'm required to do a large amount of music listening for two music history classes. I think I'm going to start trying to move beyond the "Attentive Listening" phase into the "Engaged Listening" (which is theoretically what we're supposed to be doing, I would imagine, but it's tempting to stay in the "Attentive" phase). Going all the way to "Enactive" for every piece would be extremely time consuming, but who knows - maybe I could learn to perform one or two... I would certainly remember them. And, as is discussed at the end of this chapter, it is so important for teachers to continue listening to new music as well.

p. 239 "Music teachers who see children only once or twice a week may with to enlist the help of classroom teachers in reinforcing listening experiences with children."

While this makes sense, I'm a little confused as to how this might help children do too much more than becoming familiar with a piece. If that's the goal, then this would be a valuable use of time. BUT - my question is, would the classroom teacher be working with the children in a way which promotes deep-listening? As part of a listening sequence? What is the objective of having the classroom teacher continue the listening experience? If the point of listening is to move beyond music as simply background, then I think it would be really important to stress this outside of the music classroom as well. Would be confusing for the children to have a specific piece of music that requires focus in the music classroom and that same piece of music playing in the background during the regular classroom teaching time? Or would that be helpful? I'm not sure... the book is vague on the procedural aspect of this, which seems really important.