Benefiting from Music Appreciation

Music appreciation is an educational perspective that teaches people to understand, to reason and to appreciate different genres of music through listening and participated discussions. In often educates a listener to have an idea of what to look for when listening to music.

Music appreciation has being taught in various educational levels, from as early as kindergarten level to advanced professor’s degree. In its most educational context, music appreciation is taught so that students will be able to recognize and understand different genres and aspects of music. Students are also exposed to the basic elements of music, major forms of music as well as stylistic periods. These studies would form an intelligent approach in the appreciation and understanding of music.

How can you benefit from music appreciation? Even if you’re not a musician, you can benefit from a music appreciation course for the reasons of

• General knowledge – it is always good to know for the knowledge to know more in depth about music.
• Professional careers – even if you’re not a musician, you can use the musical knowledge you gain to help you with your career such as journalists or a producer for a television production for instance.
• Better well-being – it would be beneficial for your well-being to know what music that would help you to express your emotions well and to know what music would be to help with health-related problems such as insomnia.

Music itself is an essential part of any given culture in the world we live in. Music appreciation courses can often be tailored to non-musician as well as music students. For the music major students music appreciation is gained through various aspects of music such as compositions, performing and critical listening. Music appreciation is designed in a way to have students to look at music in all of its forms.

From the historical aspect, music appreciation teaches you the history of music in order to understand why do certain types of music are favorable in a given period or era. This is just like to why you like your type of music at this very millennium age. To add, through music appreciation you would be able to examine the lives and musical works of musicians and how those have affected them and the world’s history in their respective era.

In a nutshell, to be knowledgeable in various aspects of music proves to be beneficial for everyone who has undergone music appreciation course or self research. Without it, what you know would only be limited to a certain degree and thus reflect your knowledge about music.

Making the most out of music

Music is so universal that you can almost think about it from different perspectives. One purpose that strikes me right away is entertainment. We value music as something that is entertaining. Why do we need entertainment in the first place? Music as a form of entertainment is food to our ears. It is so artistic that it can color the paleness of actions and fill the emptiness of emotions.

So what is music to you, really? There are many definitions that can be found on the Internet but the best so far that I can relate to is from Princeton where music is defined as

“an artistic form of auditory communication incorporating instrumental or vocal tones in a structured and continuous manner”.

Another good definition taken from Wikipedia is

“an art form consisting of sound and silence. Elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, structure, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.”

Because people have the need to be entertained, music is often monetized or commercialized to gain profits. You’ve been to a live performance, you bought CDs for your own listening pleasure, you went partying in a rave event and you watched a movie with heart touching film scores in the background. The list goes on and on. It is so often that money is being involved in the examples mentioned.

Music can also be used for therapy purposes and as a form of relaxation. Going through a tedious and tiring daily routine one find it to be very relaxing to listen to music. Of course, different genres of music have different effects on your mind. When you want to relax, you don’t usually listen to an adrenaline pumping music. You are not relaxed if your adrenaline is up with high heart pulse rate.

In the film industry, music is often used to enhance the emotions of viewers when they watch movies. A scene with suspense element can be further improved with music. Without music it makes the movie felt empty and less entertaining to watch. In some cases, a viewer can be bored to the max when music is overpowering what was meant in a specific conversational dialogue for example.

Music reflects your personality, your artistic sense or your complexity of mind on how you see the world. Music is influential and it can even form a unity. People group together for the cause of music. Sometimes in the worse extent, music is used to promote hatred.

Depending on how you see it, music does leave some significant meaning to your well-being. I think it is cool to mix and match by listening to various genres of music. What I mean is to pick a certain genre for a specific purpose. You won’t go for a candle light dinner with a heart throbbing music in the background right?