As you present your ticket to enter the concert hall, an usher hands you a printed program. In addition to the musical events of the evening and information about the performers, chances are the program will include short essays about the music. These essays will explain the historical and sociological context of the music and the composer(s). You might read things like this:

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart began composing and performing at age 5.

George Gershwin built his reputation as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway composer, before composing his first significant classical work, Rhapsody In Blue, in 1924.

After being awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Sydney, the University of Tartu, the University of Durham, the University of St. Andrews, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and University of Oxford, Arvo Pärt won the Ratzinger Prize, said to be the Nobel Prize in theology.

Dimitri Shostakovich was reported to have composed the 1940 Leningrad Symphony (No. 7) in resistance to Nazi totalitarianism and oppression. But after various fearsome run-ins with Josef Stalin, the symphony may well represent a protest against Stalinist totalitarianism as well.

This sort of narrative information can guide listening towards the expressive elements in the music (emotional, textural, cultural, thematic, etc.) and point towards other modes of listening. As such, the contextual mode is, paradoxically, extra-musical, in that one can appreciate Shostakovitch’s work as a historical and cultural artifact without actually hearing the music, but simply reading the story of its conception, performance, and social responses. This link to a Carnegie Hall performance the the Leningrad gives you a music and a discussion of the context.

It begins with a walk.  You can try this yourself. If you drag your left foot gently as you step forward, you generate a thump-shup thump-shup thump-shup sound. We call it a shuffle, and in music it’s called a shuffle too. Kid Andersen shows how it’s done on the guitar, Jimmy Reed-style. The bass strings provide the thump-shup and the upper strings provide the ‘talk’. Now he’s a-walkin’ and a talkin’! Shuffles appear on countless variations in all kinds of popular music, as in this example from metal pioneers Blue Őyster Cult. The shuffle can be modified, of course, into myriad variations. This next example shows a polyrhythmic extension of the shuffle in the hands of master soul/jazz drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. Check out his step-by-step lesson here.

Appreciating the shuffle is an example of the embodied mode of listening. “Embodied” means that many musical experiences have their perceptual beginnings in auditory experiences of living in our bodies. In everyday living, we experience all kinds of sounds, most of which are taken for granted, burning themselves through repetition into an auditory subconscious – an auditory subconscious which our brains then call upon when we listen to music with elements which evoke or relate to these bodily perceptual memories. You can likely come up with your own examples – an obvious one being the heartbeat, which lends its pulse to music. It’s no accident that the tempos, or the pulse of music, range typically from 60 to 120 beats per minute– the normal range of speeds of the human heartbeat.  Music, at least in part, is an expression of embodiment – the particular auditory experiences that emerge from the way we are built.

But embodied listening is not confined to pulses and rhythms. Embodiment can be the stuff of melody and harmony. More than any other pop singer, when I listen to Patti Smith, I am reminded of how her slides up and down and round, her whoops, hollers, and snarls, resemble not just other human voices but the style of rock guitar soloing – note-bending, hammering-down, slurs, rakes, the works. Listen to this performance and consider how close her phrasing, attack, and intonations resemble rock and roll guitar playing.

I mentioned harmonies can be embodied. We can perform another little experiment. Find a quiet room with no distractions. Make yourself comfortable and grimace, commanding all your facial muscles to contract, including clenching your teeth and closing your eyelids tightly. Listen to the sounds of your facial muscles contracting at various frequencies, all at once. This is the sound of dissonant harmony in your own head. In ordinary life, it’s the sound of you preparing for an impact, or fighting pain, or the sound of fear mounting. Resembling the sounds of a dissonant string section (or vice versa) film composers in particular use this embodiment trope to heighten tension in scenes involving threatening, suspenseful action. Il Maestro, Ennio Morricone, provides a fine example from his The Untouchables soundtrack, the dark-hallway scene where the Irish cop, played by Sean Connery, is being stalked by the bad guy.

The embodied mode of listening makes for compelling musical experiences, from dance to terror.  Chances are you can’t sit still.

photo:  John Z. Sadler, New Orleans courtyard, 1988

Often we can recognize a mode of listening by considering the words the listener uses in describing the music or her experience. In writing about music, authors will use ripe adjectives like torrential, sparkling, limpid, hypnotic, crackling, or turgid to mention a few of the countless examples.  Using these adjectives and descriptions root particular musical experiences into the realm of the perceptual and the physical worlds.  For instance, you may have heard listeners refer to an orchestration as ‘lush’. For me, a paradigm example is Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations for Frank Sinatra during his Capital Records era. Less well known, but perhaps even more lush, are the orchestrations by Claus Ogerman, the German arranger, conductor, and composer who recorded broadly with many jazz and pop titans, including Betty Carter, Diana Krall, to Sinatra as well. “Lush” describes a feeling of comfort in the extreme, luxuriant, opulent comfort, and is a fine illustration of the sensual mode of listening. In the sensual mode, we cogitate less and let the music ‘wash’ over us like waves on beach, or the fragrances of a garden, or the warmth of the sun on our faces. My audio example here is this arrangement by Palle Mikkelborg of Dexter Gordon playing the chestnut “More Than You Know”.  When I attend a Dallas Symphony concert in our fabulous Meyerson Symphony Center, my initial mode of response to many pieces is just to soak in the cascade of sounds, immersed in a sublime acoustic.

Not all music in the sensual mode needs to exhibit “lushness’ like in the prior examples. Attending to the sensual elements in a composition or performance may embrace a wide scope of perceptions, as music writers’ adjectives reveal to us. In this piece from the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration on ‘Porgy and Bess’ the orchestration is spare, but the sensuality emerges from the combination of musical elements and the distinctive stylistic voices of the key players on this performance: Davis, drummer Elvin Jones, and Evans as the arranger.  The descending syncopated line in the horns provides the theme, and Jones responds with his own variations all over the kit throughout the performance. His drum fills provide a broad variety of timbres, rhythms, and textures expanding the range of sounds for the listener. His ride cymbal provides a high-frequency shimmer throughout Davis trumpet solo, contrasting dramatically with Davis’ signature Harmon-muted brooding tone. Davis’ dancing short phrases with broad intervals are punctuated by Jones’ rim-snare snaps. For me, the sensuality of the performance is akin to a complex, toothsome dish in a restaurant. Tasty.

When I was a young boy in the 1950’s and 60’s, my parents, children of the Great Depression, often, perhaps usually, played records from the era of their young adulthood; in their case, the great swing era big bands of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Woody Herman, midcentury torch songs from Peggy Lee and Lena Horne. They would reminisce about the era, and the music would evoke their own, often romantic, memories, along with the broader social upheavals of World War II and the postwar period. I call this mode of listening the sentimental mode, because in this mode the music is situated in a rich network of narrative and emotional memories.  The sentimental mode provides the soundtrack for the most significant moments in our lives, and its no wonder that we encounter many listeners who are satisfied to listen only to this music, so the nostalgia of the past can be preserved and re-experienced. As one ages with music, the cumulative emotional power of the sentimental mode increases, as one compiles more and more memories through our own loves, families, children, and other significant events. The sentimental mode of listening, being so unique personal and bound up in our biographies, eludes an example which appeals to all of us. On the other hand, we have a word for an excess of the sentimental mode; schmalz, a Yiddish term originally referring to rendered chicken fat. Music that is schmalzy or mawkish is vapidly nostalgic, discouraging listening in the additional modes.

Perhaps the most familiar mode of listening by schooled musicians is what I call the structural mode. Here, the listener attends to how the music is put together, including conventional compositional structure in classical music, but also how improvisations in jazz or rock relate to the melody or motif. For example, ‘sonata form’ in classical music a way of structuring the composition into A, a theme and exposition of it, B, a ‘development’ or contrasting theme, and then a recapitulation of the theme, A. So, a simple reference to sonata form is ABA. (After you’re finished reading this, you can listen to Peter Schickele’s amusing commentary on Beethoven’s 5th symphony, first movement, as an example of sonata form. Think music education as sportscaster commentary!  The key words are theme, development, ‘recap’ [recapitulation].) Jazz musicians do a various on the sonata form, where they play a ‘head’, the melody or main theme, then use the melody and harmonic structure of the piece to improvise variations, then return to the head to close out the performance. (A splendid example is John Beasley’s “Caddo Bayou”.) Of course, the structural appreciation of music is not limited to just theme and variation considerations. Musicians pay attention to the use of harmonies, rhythms, timbre (the sound textures of instruments) and many other elements which they learn through their education. What is pleasing about appreciating structure, for me at least, is hearing how the composer/performer plays with the rules, or even, tinkers with the rules.

But the structural mode of listening requires some knowledge, and we all know people can enjoy music without knowing a lick of music theory or having any ability to play an instrument. How do people do this? For me, this is the most interesting aesthetic question of all, and understanding additional modes of listening helps us understand not only our own but others’ reactions to music.

For readers, this blog is about enhancing your enjoyment of music. I hope to enhance yours by sharing what has enhanced mine. The blog will include essays, reviews, topical discussions, but few to no rants. (Rants almost never enhance my enjoyment of anything.)

My musical aesthetic closely mirrors what I think about art. Music and art are better when they can be appreciated in a number of ways. Indeed, the more ways one can listen to and interpret music the ‘better’ the music is. Stated differently, a work of art or music is only as good as the number of modes of experiencing the work can sustain. So a fundamental way I approach listening is to listen in different ‘modes’. Modes are interpretive schemes, ways of listening, ways of thinking what the music is about or how it moves me. What I mean by modes of listening is best illustrated by presenting the modes of listening I have identified. In posts to come, I’ll be describing a series of modes of listening which are the theory for the way I approach writing about music.

John Zell Sadler grew up in a loving family in a small town in the U.S. Midwest. His interest in music appeared as a preschooler when he sang along with TV’s Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse. Discouraging his singing, his parents provided him piano and Hammond organ lessons at age 7. His teacher, Phyllis Miller, was patient and encouraged his interest in music theory. John practiced intermittently and often spent his time trying to master licks from Booker T Jones, Keith Emerson, and Jimmy Smith instead of learning the second part of the Bach thing (e.g., the fugue). He would distract Mrs. Miller from having John play during his lessons by bringing in records for what she called ‘ear training.’ One of his earliest memories was that an otherwise-somber Mrs. Miller thought Elvis could “really sing.” His impoverished aptitude for playing keyboards was evident by age 15. By this time he had joined his high school marching and jazz bands, and had developed some proficiency on the trombone. He was taught by a then-youthful Allen Horney who was patient and encouraged his interest in music theory. John’s accomplishments on the trombone warranted his placement in third chair in his high school’s jazz big band. When the jazz band’s pianist dropped out, the band director encouraged John to take the piano seat, but he didn’t know that John had since learned he was much better playing one note at a time on the trombone rather than several at once on the piano. Fretfully John refused the piano seat, and was allowed to retain his third chair in the trombone section. The faculty band director, Walter Anslinger, had no clue he was a major influence on the youth through stimulating his interest in jazz, which became a lifetime passion, along with other genres of music. John had made friends with a number of classmates who were rock musicians and were in bands. They allowed him to hang out at their practices, didn’t beat him up, and surprisingly liked to listen to him talk about the latest albums. As a high school junior, his friends had formed a band called “Masterson” (the original!) and allowed him to play Fender Rhodes piano in the band as long as he didn’t turn up the amplifier. During high school John had developed an interest in psychology and began to read philosophy and counterculture screeds from the likes of Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing. He became a professor at a prominent academic medical center, a husband, and a father. Ultimately he ended up becoming a semi-famous psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry, authoring and editing various books in the field. Throughout his adult life he dreamed of being a music writer someday. That day arrived with Time’s Rapture..