In this section, Professor Emily Richmond Pollock explains why she asks students to practice attentive listening to music without distractions, and how the practice of listening relates to her philosophy about approaching difficult tasks.
When I assign supplemental listening exercises in the course, I request that students listen with no distractions. I ask students to engage in this kind of deeper, more attentive listening because I believe that doing difficult things gets better with practice, whether that difficult task is reading scores of symphonies, learning how to listen to classical music when you are not familiar with classical music, or in this case, listening to twentieth-century music, which can be difficult to grasp aurally when you listen to a new work for the first time.
If students make a point of listening to a lot of music with undivided attention, in conditions that allow them to focus on listening, they will get better at it. It’s as simple as that. They’ll be more equipped to go to a concert and listen to a twentieth-century piece they’ve never heard before and have some kind of meaningful and aesthetic experience.
"[I want] my students to embrace attentive listening as a practice, maybe in the same way that yoga is a practice."
Putting these listening exercises into every daily assignment encourages my students to embrace attentive listening as a practice, maybe in the same way that yoga is a practice. You’re working out your brain not so that you immediately become some kind of listening genius who can hear every single note at all times, but because listening in a present and practiced way demystifies complicated music and provides a richer, more personal experience with the piece.
Often, MIT students are used to being really good at everything and when they encounter something unfamiliar, they might be resistant because they can’t immediately understand it or have an obvious aesthetic relationship with it. The supplemental listening exercises expose students to unfamiliar music so they can get better at listening to unfamiliar music, period. The more they work at it, the more they’ll understand the music, and the more confident they’ll be in their own reactions.
