The Whole Music Experience

In our sped up world, we don't often take the time to deeply listen to music. I remember taking a music appreciation class at college in 1982 where the professor played a recording of Bach's Fugue in G minor every day for the entire quarter. We learned every nuance of that fugue, even if I didn't seriously listen to Bach' s music several decades later. So, for this practice get out your headphones and your music diary. Then listen to Kate Bush's "Man with a Child in His Eyes" which I'm including below. But first, I'm going to give you my impression of the song. Usually, when I review music, I review an entire album and I don't meditate on a single song. However, for this exercise, I have listened to this song several times through headphones. I've also heard the song many times in my adult life because I'm a fan of Kate Bush's work. It's important that you hear the song as opposed to just listening to it with your ears and...

Wikipedia As I mention in my book Whole Music , when I was a child I fell in love with timbre and the voices of the individual instruments we listened to in music class.  Each instrument conjured a specific emotions or feeling in me.  The French horn caused me to feel majestic and the cello invoked melancholy.  My moods would shift with each instrument that I heard and my moods would shift quickly. Today, I listen to more than timbre, but I have an understanding of how tone, frequencies of the tone and timbre (the color of the tone) affect me on all levels.  And I wonder what listening to an entire symphony does with its many voices, themes, keys, musical passages etc... In the concept of "whole music" I prefer not to separate musical components, but in the case of this post, I will present solo instruments for your listening and feeling pleasure. If you keep a music journal (and I hope that you do by now), write down the emotions that come up with each instr...