This is a basic skill to develop in order to truly enjoy a piece of music or perform it or dance to it with some degree of accomplishment.

Here are some key questions to think about as you listen:

What patterns repeat?

What provides contrast?

Is there some kind of development?

Is the music static? What makes you say yes or no?

How does time feel to you as you listen to a certain piece of music?

What role does memory play in helping you recognize musical “time”?

Embryologists tell us that by the end of the second trimester of pregnancy–around the 24th week–a fetus begins responding to the sound of the mother’s voice, the rhythms of her heartbeat and breathing, as well as sounds from the immediate environment–including, of course, the music she is listening to.

This is one good reason for expectant mothers to be mindful of what they are listening to.  Remember, music affects the mother’s nervous system as well as the baby’s!  We have eyelids but no earlids to protect us.

The fact that the ear is the first of our sense organs to develop gives us much food for thought:

• Music has an enormous effect on us throughout our lives, physically, mentally, and spiritually.
• It can alter our breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and even our temperature. We are part of a vast vibrating, pulsating world, influenced by changes in the weather, the seasons, day and night.
• Every known culture uses musical sounds to communicate with the spiritual/religious world.
• At the other end of the life cycle, patients in a coma have been known to respond by arm twitches or eyelid flutters to familiar voices and songs.

It all starts with our earliest awareness:  the heart beat and the rhythm of breathing in utero.  After birth this becomes magically transformed into the beat of a drum and the many rhythms of music–and even the subliminal messages communicated by the music of commercials.

A  number of neuroscientists suggest that human language evolved from musical sounds much like the speech-songs of whales and dolphins.  When you think about it, human adults seem to naturally converse with babies using “sing-song” tones.

Here is one of Bach’s most beautiful melodies (“Air” from Suite no. 3 in D major) created especially for listening during pregnancy. It is played at 66 beats per minute, slightly slower than the typical heartbeat. Take a moment to listen with your eyes closed, breathing in concert with the music. Notice the effect on you. Savor the experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who doesn’t have the urge to dance and sing at a wedding ceremony or certainly the reception or a special birthday party?

Is there a country without a national anthem? Is it ever possible to watch or attend a major league baseball game without hearing “The Star Spangled Banner”? July 4th and fireworks without Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”? Impossible!

For some, singing “Amazing Grace” is a must at every family reunion.

For those in the Civil Rights movements and many liberation struggles, the rallying musical statement was and is “We Shall Overcome.”

Is the celebration of Christmas complete without hearing a performance somewhere of Handel’s “Messiah,” or Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” or having our listening space saturated with Christmas carols?

What are some of your favorite pieces of music that belong to the social and ritual parts of your life?

I hear you ringing in my ears.

“That’s my kind of music.”

“They’re singing our song.”

Is there any form of human expression more personal than music? How rarely, if ever, do we hear someone say, “That’s my kind of poem” or novel or play or painting?

Musical memories define so much of who we are and the many stations we pass through on life’s journey: your high school graduation, your first real love, your courtship, the first Broadway show or concert you attended, your loss of a loved one, your connection with your parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren.

For starters, think of such standards as “Memories of You,” “Memory Lane,” “Laura,” “Unforgettable,” or “Memory” in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats.

Or how about the Hoagy Carmichael classic, “Star Dust,” which is “a richly layered statement about memory. It is not simply a conventional ballad of love lost, but rather a song about a song, and the evocative power of that song, as a lover, solitary and forlorn, gazes at the stars, humming it in his head all the while” (Joshua Berrett, Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004, 166).

The list goes on and on. How many operas, musicals, and movies depend on themes and motifs to recall or identify a situation or character?

Think of John Williams’ music for Darth Vader or Princess Leia in Star Wars, Verdi and his Ethiopian princess Aida, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, Bernard Herrmann and his soundtrack for Hitchock’s Vertigo, James Horner’s “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, and so many more.

What do you hear and feel when you listen to certain music? What music lives in your personal memory?