You probably chose your instrument because you love its sound and the style of music it commonly plays. If you’re a dedicated music student, you probably listen quite a bit to that style both for inspiration and enjoyment. That’s great, and keep doing it. Don't get too stuck in your listening habits that you forget to explore, though! Listening to different kinds of music opens your mind and ears. It gives depth to your understanding of music and makes you a more well-rounded musician.
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Listen to styles that you think you don’t like. You still don’t have to like them. But see if you can figure out why other people DO enjoy them. You don’t have to ‘waste’ your precious listening time on these styles - just pay a bit more attention when you do hear them. Listen to the music at the grocery store, on hold, in the elevator, in someone’s blaring car stereo, or your neighbor’s party. Remember that someone went to the trouble of composing, playing, and recording it, and someone has decided to play it within your earshot. Why?
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Pay attention to sounds around you. Listen to rhythms in machines, the barely audible whine that your phone charger makes, bird calls, your heartbeat and breathing, the background hum of people talking in a public place, the pitch or bell that a store door sound when you enter.
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Intentionally explore world musical styles you know nothing about. Regardless of where you live, if you’re connected enough the modern world to be on a site like Lessonface, you're probably most accustomed to music in major and minor keys, with rhythms based in three or four. But there is a lot of music out there, new and old, that’s not based on these tonal and rhythmic systems. Check out this pretty extensive list of musical styles on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_music_styles . How many do you recognize?
Here are a few examples of styles that opened up my ears when I first heard them:
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Tuvan throat singing (https://youtu.be/V76psBrEypg) and polyponic overtone singing (https://youtu.be/vC9Qh709gas) - the idea that the human voice can sing more than one note at a time seemed pretty crazy the first time I heard it.
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Tabla and Indian rhythms - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabla . Having these rhythms explained to me by someone who had studied them seriously was mathematically mind-boggling.
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Music outside of the twelve-tone system that we are most accustomed to (https://www.lessonface.com/content/why-does-our-musical-alphabet-have-twelve-tones) such as Indonesian gamelan music (https://youtu.be/WFrOAJMpryQ ,
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20th century composers who pushed the boundaries of their times… just to name a few:
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Stravinsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Stravinsky),
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Schoenberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg)
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John Cage (Third Construction https://youtu.be/rEWwF10Z7-0, Imaginary Landscape https://youtu.be/22xGnOvqHKg , 4’33 https://youtu.be/kGEG4JiOqew)
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What styles have surprised you and opened your mind and ears when you first heard them? Do you also enjoy listening to these genres for pleasure? Did they change your perspective on music? Are there styles that you respect but don’t enjoy hearing?
