What are you really listening to?

By Gabriel Mata | The Rider

You listen to it every day, you love it and you feel ecstasy from it, yet you don’t know what it is. Music history and world music Assistant Professor Andrés Amado spoke about the philosophy of music.

The audience was first prompted to think of their favorite song, then to discuss with a neighbor why the song was their favorite. Students were encouraged to share their favorite songs with the rest of the audience as well as the reasons that they were their favorite.

Amado played the national anthem, as well as “Winter” by Antonio Vivaldi, asking the audience to describe what each piece meant or felt like to them.

To make sense of the first activity, Amado explained, “Music can be very personal. We may choose different pieces of music that speak to us, and even if we choose the same one [as someone else], it may not speak to us in the same kind of way.”

He said audience members’ response to the national anthem is patriotism.

“That’s because the context in which we experience the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ is a collective context,” Amado said.

And with “Winter” the audience was in agreement that the piece felt ominous and creepy, but after reading a poem that the composer created for the piece, students’ views on the piece shifted.

Amado read a quote by Christopher Small that explains how music isn’t a physical thing.

“We have this word music that makes us think it’s a noun, [which], in fact, it’s not a thing. It’s something we do,” he said.

During the question-and-answer portion of the event, discussion quickly turned to what the piece “4’33” by John Cage means.

Some students argued that it was a form of commentary on how music was perceived, others believed that the piece was just nonsense created by an eccentric composer.

Asked what his favorite song was, Amado replied: “I don’t think I have a clear answer to that question because I think my music taste is very situational and sort of conditioned to a certain context.”