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listening to music
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Question one is about the different ways of listening to music. This is a reading debate essay of the three. Whilst you should make arguments, it is necessary that you quote from readings and back them up because you can’t get enough simply from looking at particular uses of music in the contemporary scene. They should be there to reinforce and illustrate your marshalling of other peoples’ arguments. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got no voice. Your voice in this type of essay first of all is from the way that you use the arguments, certainly which bits you tend to cite or lean on from the texts and also what points you are trying to make by using them. We are looking for a reasonable depth of reading on it and looking for an academic quality of balanced argument. I don’t think when you have done the reading that it is actually viable or valid to come up with a very strong argument down one side of this. There are strong cases, as one would expect really for a mix of these three factors. I would tend to adopt a set approach to each of the three propositions. In what way can you demonstrate that the music itself affects how listeners listen to it without any knowledge of the artists or anything? I think it is certainly possible to argue that that is only a hypothetical premise anyway because if for example anyone puts on Method Man, people laugh and are clearly going to respond in the contextual way - it is not just music with different musical values, it carries cultural codings and values. Now whether you call that the music itself or whether you call that part of its cultural trappings is down to your line of argument. The music itself is probably the least likely to be a strong plank in this. You certainly should be able to demonstrate some context in which music itself affects listening and part of Adorno’s arguments do tend that way. For example, I think that you could use his fundamental division between art music and popular music and perhaps say that it isn’t possible to listen to art music in the way and for the purposes that you listen to popular music - that his assumed gratifications from those two forms don’t cross over. In a way, that the music itself will determine certain things about listening and that you can’t bop around to Mozart and you can’t furrow your brow over Gareth Gates. There is something there about what the music allows you to get from it. Adorno primarily illustrates the importance of personality or orientation of music. As you go through that, you should look at most or all of the points of his typology of listening of which there are seven. The Adorno stuff is very much of its time - it shows the crudity of mass culture when radio was the primary means of record distribution and not records. It is definitely valid to criticise Adorno and one of the outcomes we expect at this level is a critical approach. You can challenge Adorno on various bases and certainly you can qualify him and say that much of what he says has relevance at the time and continues to have relevance now, some of it does not do so in a mature popular music market and that perhaps the line between the types of music and therefore the types of listener that he elaborates is not as clear as it was then/does not exist/not useful - all of which are a fair comment. From Chris Kennett, we have the varying effects of listening contexts. Some of them were technical, environmental and social. There are lots of possibilities arguing in favour of the context of listening. It is worth constantly looking back at the title while you write and make sure that you are covering it and looking at the word for word aspects. How do you start? Adorno possibly - different ways of listening to music in terms of what you are listening to it for but then you could also put in there the context sensitivity - a way of listening to music is extremely loud in the car or on a walkman or drifting off to sleep. In fact, the preconceptions around those say something about the choice of music and the kind of perception that you’re applying to it. For example, if you are putting it on a sleep timer, you won’t really be getting into it and try to work out any technical aspects of it - it is there for a highly specified function.
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