Maybe it’s best to listen first and ask questions later when it comes to appreciating music? That’s what a recent study published in the Psychology of Music journal seems to suggest. In “When program notes don’t help: Music descriptions and enjoyment,” Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (University of Arkansas) explores the reactions of non-musicians to samples of Beethoven string quartets. Those participants who listened without first wading through program notes found the experience more enjoyable. Margulis suggests that perhaps “when people without extensive formal training listen to music in terms of verbal descriptions, they may work so hard at connecting the notes into label-able phenomena that they lose the ability … to hear the subtle interconnections among the sounds. These interconnections may be fundamental to music enjoyment.” So much for “if you teach them, they will come.”
The study came across my desk via the new-to-me but very enlightening Miller-McCune website, and you can read more about Margulis’s work there (as well as a great piece on David Cope’s AI “composer”). Unless I’m actively researching a piece of music, I usually ignore the program or liner notes that accompany the auditory experience, at least at first. Like a child, I don’t want to be told things. A new piece of music is an exciting thing, and I want to run off and explore the sound world being offered. Let me get inside and wander around a bit before making me sit and read an essay rooted in someone else’s interpretation. Margulis is very cautious not to dismiss program notes as completely without merit, but reporter Tom Jacobs notes this tasty line from the report attributed to composer and musical theorist Leonard Meyer: “Listening to music intelligently is more like knowing how to ride a bicycle than knowing why a bicycle is ridable.”
(If the intro music to this post was undeniably Pink Floyd, then the exit track is provided courtesy of Queen.)
When I have a recording to review, I tend to listen the first time without reading the liner notes, especially if it is a piece of unfamiliar music. That way I can formulate my opinion of the piece and the performance based solely on what I hear and not on what I have read about what I was about to hear.
When I go to a concert for pleasure (and not for work), there is so much happening for me to watch as well as to hear, that reading the program notes beforehand, if they are well written and interesting, adds to the pleasure of the experience.
I think that the program note experience has a great deal to do with the quality and content of the program notes, as well as with the music at hand.
I would be rather curious about what type of program notes they tested on people. They call these people non-musicians – but if they’re non-musicians, were they even able to understand the notes at all? Many times, program notes contain musical terminology that isn’t explained, so could it be that the notes put them off the work?
Interesting study, and I hope they get a chance to refine it even further to see what’s going on.
Molly adds: Good point. Also, I realize I may not have stressed the non-musician part of this study enough when I jumped directly to my own experiences, so thanks for bringing that back in.
Interesting quote: “Like a child, I don’t want to be told things. . . . Let me get inside and wander around a bit before making me sit and read an essay rooted in someone else’s interpretation.”
I agree, but would add these two items: someone else’s “sense of life” and “details about the composer’s psychology.”
Because it lacks specific subject matter, music is the most personal of the arts. The emotions experienced while listening stem from details provided by the listener’s subconcious. This is as true for the writer of program notes as it is for the non-musician.
I never read program notes before listening to music in a concert setting, no matter how familiar the music. Even if the notes are of high quality, they can wait until I get home, or until the next day.
Louis Torres, Non-musician, Co-Editor, Aristos (An Online Review of the Arts), and Co-Author, ‘What Art Is'(which includes chapters on music) http://www.aristos.org
The reason I raised the issue about what type of people they were was that I found that some of the biggest leaps in my own music appreciation were when I read or heard a good explanation of what to listen for in the music. But the two biggest problems I run across are:
a) I don’t understand what I’m reading.
or
b) I can’t tell which musical moment the text is referring to. (e.g. “The second theme contains a wonderful flute theme.” – that’s great, but how do I know where the second theme starts?)
So if I’m not alone in this, and it’s the case that the listeners were trying to a) puzzle over what the notes meant and b) were trying to listen out for moments that couldn’t readily be identified – then is it any wonder that it was easier just to relax and listen to the music.
What I’d like to see is what happened when you played them music and simultaneously flashed notes at the appropriate moments (a little bit like the old Concert Companion experiment used to do). As long as the notes were written simply enough to be understood, by flashing up at the moment when you wanted the reader to listen to something, they would then take out this element of trying to connect notes with music.
There’s no research exists on this, but I suspect if you were to conduct an experiment like that (with high-quality notes that coudl be understood), the results would come out very differently.
In short: descriptions that confuse or that can’t be easily identified with the music in question may work against enjoyment of the msuic, but descriptions that can be easily followed and linked to what you’re hearing may actually open up new levels of appreciation.
Only Beethoven Quartets on the program and no given criteria for what the program notes were. So that’s science? Some works are aided by program notes, some not.
And of course, the program notes must be good.
More important is the ironic allusion to music education. What would happen at a concert of string quartets if amateur string players were compared to people who don’t play an instrument? The amateurs would probably enjoy the experience much more. And they would also be much more crtically engaged. So we don’t need no education, eh?
First, I’d say that “wading through” is a fairly loaded phrase to be using, implying a particular attitude towards program notes. (One which Margulis doesn’t hold, incidentally.) As Elaine says, quality and content make a difference.
Matthew, to answer your question: Margulis used two different types of descriptions – “dramatic” and “structural” – plus a control group of excerpts which had no descriptions at all. The actual excerpts were quite short: 45 seconds. Participants heard samples from all three groups. (None of the 16 participants were music majors or professional musicians, but half said they listened regularly to classical music, and nine of them had taken private lessons and/or played in ensembles.)
An idea of one of her “dramatic” descriptions: “The opening evokes a deeply-felt hymn; it is as if we are hearing not the hymn itself, but rather the sounds of the hymn filtered through the ears of someone passionately connected to it.”
And the equivalent “structural” description: “This piece begins with a series of slow, sustained chords that grow louder and achieve resolution.”
Speaking for myself, neither is quite the kind of thing I’d look for in a program note, but I’m guessing she wanted to emphasise the differences between two different approaches.
The important thing, though, in relation to Matthew’s query, is that Margulis explicitly went out of her way to ensure: “The language was chosen so that no special training in music was required to understand the descriptions.” Participants also had to complete a comprehension test before listening to ensure they’d understood the descriptions.
One of her observations/conclusions is interesting and slightly surprising: “Descriptions provide conceptualization, and thus diminish enjoyment, but dramatic descriptions provide more effective conceptualization (as suggested by their better recollection from a music trigger), and thus diminish enjoyment even more.”
Margulis also quotes the Leonard Meyer (1973) quote in full. The cute bit about riding a bicycle is immediately followed by: “This is not to contend that education cannot enhance understanding and hence appreciation and enjoyment…”
And Margulis herself, in talking about people with greater musical experience, says: “Perhaps concepts impeded flow only at an early stage of conceptualization. With increased experience, the concepts may become internalized, and aid enjoyment by enriching experience without interfering with flow.” She makes some astute conclusions vis a vis ramifications for education.
It supports my personal view that you don’t “draw people in” or create positive first experiences necessarily by “educating” them, but that music-lovers seek out different kinds of education and depth of knowledge once they are drawn in.
The phenomenon of labels/descriptions impeding memory or enjoyment isn’t restricted to music. Margulis cites studies in which describing a human face or the taste of a jam diminishes memory/discrimination. And labelling a chair using a basic category word like “chair” makes it difficult to remember the particular kind of chair. That seems to be taking things into left-brain/right-brain territory.
Yanagi Soetsu, founder of the Japanese Folk Craft movement in the 20s-30s once wrote:
“To ‘see’ is to go direct to the core; to know the facts about an object of beauty is to go around the periphery. Intellectual discrimination is less essential to an understanding of beauty than the power of intuition that precedes it.”
Voice from the back of the room:
“So remind me again, I need Schenker in order to …?”
Re Matthew’s second comment: Margulis’s experiments used very short examples (45 seconds) and brief descriptions. That would have eliminated the issue of not being able to recognise when the second theme begins [although in the hypothetical example you give, one would assume the writer is mentioning the flute to help the reader spot it].
I do agree, though, that a study exploring the challenge of long-range navigation of classical music using textual aids would be very interesting.
FWIW, it’s not only music that this phenomenon applies to: I have long since discovered that I’m only interested in reading the preface or foreword to a book after I’ve read the book—or, perhaps, before I read it a second time.
I wonder how these experiments would have come out had the experience been to listen to a piece, read the program notes and then read them again?
As a voice teacher for both performance and music education majors, I require that the students prepare both program notes and translations for their recitals. The notes are important in helping the student place the song or aria in the context of when it was written. Once they’ve done the research, they pare the note down to a paragraph for the audience, speaking more about their interpretation of the work than about the composer. Of course, the translations are crucial to the audience’s enjoyment of the concert. Song is what most distinguishes us from other instruments, and text is all. If that means that the audience spends some time reading the translations rather than watching the singer, that’s fine. It’s obviously not just about pretty melodies.