31 Jan Do you agree with the author’s position about listening? Do you think that listening is anative gift? Explain your answer.O 2. What do you think the autho
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MUSIC
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
…“Listening is a talent, and like any other talent or gift, we possess it in varying degrees. I have found among music-lovers a marked tendency to underestimate and mistrust this talent, rather than to overestimate it… I should say that there are two principal requisites for talented listening: first, the ability to open oneself up to musical experience; and secondly, the ability to evaluate critically that experience…Neither of these is possible without a certain native gift. Listening implies an inborn talent of some degree, which, again like any other talent, can be trained and developed. This talent has a certain purity about it. We exercise so to speak, for ourselves alone; there is nothing to be gained from it in a material sense. Listening is its own reward; there are no prizes to be won, no contests of creative listening. But I hold that person fortunate who has the gift, for there are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it”…
Copland, Aaron. Music and Imagination. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 1953. Library of Congress.
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Questions
Do you agree with the author's position about listening? Do you think that listening is a native gift? Explain your answer.
2. What do you think the author implies by “talented listening”. What do you think talent is in the first place?
3. How can talent be trained?
4. What do you think the author means with the phrase: “…one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it…” Make sure to read and analyze the phrase in the context of this particular paragraph.
5. Why do you think that the author holds in such high regard the ability of listening?
6. The author talks about two requisites for talented listening. Would you be able to identify how much do you have of these two “requisites”? How much of those requisites do you see fulfilled in your own listening experience?
7. How do you think the process of listening occurs? From the outside in, inside out?
Identity
Innovation
Music Revolution
Culture
Impact on brain and body
Environment
MUSIC
Reflects and creates social conditions, take for instance the way we listen and have access to music today (recording industry)
Music is such a powerful medium than in some societies some types of music are controlled or prohibited.
Music facilitate communication, music gets the meaning understood, when words are not enough.
Promotes national awareness and identity
Improves quality of life
It creates particular physiological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral reactions in all of us
(sometimes we are not even aware of it, for example, when we go shopping)
It has the ability to alter mood, both in good or bad ways
Its therapeutic benefits are countless
Enhances human development in early years, through development of social skills
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