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Music Listening Is Creative

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 Special Focus on Teaching for Musical Creativity
by John Kratus

Music Listening Is
Creative
Abstract: Active music listening is a creative activity in that the listener constructs a uniquely
personal musical experience. Most approaches to teaching music listening emphasize a con-
ceptual approach in which students learn to identify various characteristics of musical sound.
Unfortunately, this type of listening is rarely done outside of schools. This article establishes
a framework for teaching music listening as creative by maximizing students’ individual and
diverse ways of listening.
Keywords: concepts, creativity, experience, listener, listening, music

L
et us imagine a new app for your phone
called ListeningCheck. It is able to read
your mind when you listen to music and
will buzz you when you listen to music incor-
rectly. You are at an orchestra concert and are
delighting in the mournful oboe melody in
How can music a somber passage. Suddenly ListeningCheck
educators engage their buzzes loudly and tells you that the wood-
wind you are listening to is an English horn,
students’ creative not an oboe. Embarrassed, you slip out of
your seat and head for the exit.
thinking when listening As you drive home, you are listening to a
to music? country radio station, tapping your thumb to
the beat on the steering wheel. You think, “I
love these sad minor songs.” ListeningCheck
buzzes louder, drowning out the music. The
app tells you that the song is in in Dorian
mode, not minor, and that you missed tapping
that last hemiola. Regrettably, you turn off the
radio to avoid making further mistakes.
Thank goodness, there is no such app as
ListeningCheck.
When children begin schooling, they
already know how to listen to music. Stud-
ies have shown that music listening begins
in the womb and that newborns can even
retain a memory of the musical themes
heard before birth. 1 Children as young as
nine months are active music listeners and
can develop clear preferences for some
types of music and not for others. 2 The
value that children place on music listening
is evidenced by the amount of time they
spend doing so as they grow older. Ameri-
can students between the ages of eight and
ten listen to music about one hour per day,
and this increases to about three hours per
day for fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds.3 On
any given day, 81 percent of American teens
spend time listening to music.4
Adolescents choose to listen to music
to satisfy a variety of personal and social
needs. Recent research suggests that listen-
ing to music serves an important function in
adolescence by helping to relieve tension
and stress, cope with personal difficulties,
and develop personal and social identities.5
Given the value of music listening in the
lives of young people, one would think that
music educators would find students highly

John Kratus is a professor emeritus of music education from Michigan State University, now residing in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
He can be contacted at Kratus@msu.edu.

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Copyright © 2017 National Association
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DOI: 10.1177/0027432116686843 http://bit.ly/ListeningIsCreative
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46 Music Educators Journal  March 2017

receptive to lessons that enhance their
listening skills.
However, many music educators find
that listening is one of the most diffi-
cult and elusive musical skills to teach.
This article proposes that the teaching
of music listening could be enriched
by regarding listening as a creative
endeavor, one in which the listener’s
creativity shapes the meaning and value
of the experience. The purposes of this
article are to (1) examine traditional
approaches to teaching music listening,
(2) review some of the existing research
on creative listening, and (3) propose
an approach for fostering and assessing
students’ creative listening skills.
Music Listening and Concept
Development
One difficulty in teaching listening is
that listening is a covert behavior6 in that
the activity takes place inside a person’s
head and is not observable to others. A
student sitting quietly during a music lis-
tening lesson could be focusing intently
on the music or thinking about some-
thing entirely different. Jody Kerchner,
an associate professor of music educa-
tion at Ohio’s Oberlin College, points
out that there is “no empirical way of
observing, describing, measuring, or
evaluating the listener’s mental repre-
sentations of the quality of their listening
experience.”7 Teachers must find ways
of making the covert behavior overt
by asking students to translate a men-
tal, musical operation into something
observable, like words, movements, or
drawings. All of these ways, including
the ones proposed later in this article,
transform the music listening experi-
ence into an overt behavior to convey
students’ understanding of the music to
the teacher and others. Until a means
to read students’ minds is available to
teachers—not a pleasant thought—it
must be understood that the ways stu-
dents communicate their music listening
to teachers is only an approximation of
their covert musical experience.
Many traditional approaches to
teaching music listening are based on
concept development—a phrase used
www.nafme.org
widely in the 1960s and 1970s but much
less frequently today. A concept is a
learned generalization or abstraction of
something developed through multiple
experiences and interactions. For exam-
ple, we have concepts of “dog” and “the
color red.” We know whether an ani-
mal we encounter is a dog or not and
whether a color we see is red or not. We
develop concepts over time, and they
continue to change and be refined as we
grow. These concepts then enable us to
organize our thoughts and make sense
of a complex world.
Music concepts are musical charac-
teristics or syntactic qualities such as
“the sound of a trumpet” or “the sol-
mi pattern.” A traditional approach to
teaching music concepts is to provide
students, either through listening or
performance, with multiple examples
of music exemplifying the concept. For
example, teachers can guide students
to sing and listen to music with various
examples of the sol-mi pattern. Students
then come to identify sol-mi within the
context of the music. Such an approach
to teaching listening presupposes that
one’s experience of music is depend-
ent on one’s correct identification of its
perceptual features. As shown in the fic-
tional “ListeningCheck” vignette, listen-
ing to music concepts in an objective
way is not necessarily pleasurable.
Concepts do enable people to make
sense of musical and structural quali-
ties in musical sound. The problem is
that the type of focus on music con-
cepts as taught in traditional lessons is
rarely experienced outside of the music
classroom. For example, when listening
to music for pleasure, people do not
typically take dictation, as they would
in a collegiate aural skills class. Nor
do they think “piano–crescendo–fortis-
simo–decrescendo–pianissimo,” as they
might when learning the names of vari-
ous dynamic levels. Rather than focus
on a single dimension of music, listeners
in real-world settings create their own
experience by shifting attention among
a variety of simultaneous aspects of
music as directed by their knowledge,
mood, and context. In effect, listen-
ing to music is an act of creation, and
the listener’s unique experience is the
resulting product.
Creative Music Listening
Considering music listening to be a cre-
ative activity is not a new idea in music
education. An article in the 1930 Music
Supervisors Journal stated that “cre-
ative listening should be the basis of
all [learning] developments.” 8 In 1954,
author E.  T. McSwain noted in Music
Educators Journal that “Creative listen-
ing is an important part of a balanced
curriculum.” 9 Saul Feinberg, a high
school music teacher in Philadelphia,
in 1974 wrote that “a creative approach
to perceptive listening involves the set-
ting up of problem-solving situations in
which the listener can function as both a
thinker (a problem-solver) and a learner
(a gainer of knowledge).”10
Researcher Robert Dunn, who has
studied students’ ability to draw visual
representations of music while listen-
ing, described creative listening in this
way:
Creative listening: (1) is an active process
that involves unique, individual cognitive
and affective responses to music, (2) allows
individuals . . . to become co-creators of
the musical experience, (3) involves both
objective and subjective, including imagina-
tive, response, (4) can involve extra-musi-
cal references . . . , (5) is directly affected
by individual feelings . . . , (6) enables us to
create holistic, inner perceptual structures
of the music, the creative product . . . , (7)
involves “thinking in sound,” (8) involves
reflection-in-action . . . , (9) is an authentic
natural process, and (10) can be influenced
by education.11
Another framework for understand-
ing creative listening was proposed by
Canadian music professor Eila Peter-
son, 12 who based her work on ideas
borrowed from philosophers, compos-
ers, music psychologists, and creativity
researchers. Peterson described the lis-
tener as an active, creative music-maker,
one who constructs a unique perception
of music. This is done by attending to
various aspects of the music and organ-
izing the mental representations of the
47
music in accordance with the listener’s
skills, background knowledge, attitudes,
and goals. The listener, therefore, makes
creative choices in the moment as to
how to listen to music.
As shown in the theoretical work of
Dunn and Peterson, when one listens
to music, one creates a personal experi-
ence of the music. Musical experience
is as dependent on the listener as it is
on the sound of the music. A listener’s
mental representation of the music is, in
essence, the music for that individual.
Two Types of Thinking, Four
Types of Creativity
Over the years, the field of psychology
has provided music educators many
ideas to enhance instruction (e.g., sound
before symbol). Psychologists have
identified two types of problem solving
that may be applied to the understand-
ing of music listening. Convergent think-
ing is a form of problem solving that
results in a single correct answer. Diver-
gent thinking results in multiple correct
answers. In Peter Webster’s model of
creative thinking in music, both con-
vergent and divergent thinking are nec-
essary in the production of a created
musical product.13
Most formal education and most
approaches to teaching music listening
encourage students’ convergent think-
ing. The following questions all require
convergent thinking, or convergent
listening:
•• Is the song in major or minor?
•• Which instrument plays the melody?
•• Does the rhythm pattern repeat?
Convergent thinking, or convergent lis-
tening, allows for objective assessment
of learning because a teacher can easily
determine whether a student’s answer is
right or wrong.
However, authentic music listening is
highly divergent, and each listener cre-
ates a unique music experience. Some
questions that would cultivate divergent
thinking, or divergent listening, are:
•• What do you find most interesting
in this piece?
48
•• How could you move to this music?
•• What images come to mind when
you listen to this music?
Divergent thinking does not result in
right or wrong answers because there
are no models of correctness.
Traditional approaches to teaching
music listening emphasize convergent
listening. The problem is: How can
educators teach students to improve
their divergent listening? How can we
teach something that everyone does dif-
ferently, and how do we assess student
learning?
The solution may be to consider
that convergent listening lessons teach
what to listen for, and divergent listen-
ing lessons teach ways of listening. Once
again, concepts borrowed from psychol-
ogy help to clarify our thinking. Four
concepts from the psychology of crea-
tivity can be applied to the teaching of
divergent listening: fluency, flexibility,
elaboration, and originality.
Fluency
A fluent thinker is able to think of many
possible answers in response to a ques-
tion, problem, or situation. For example,
a fluent thinker, when asked where to
go for lunch, might think of eight pos-
sible restaurants instead of one or two.
When this concept is applied to music
listening, a fluent listener is able to hear,
think of, or feel many things while lis-
tening to music.
To teach fluency in listening, a
teacher can ask students to listen to a
piece of music and while listening write
a list of things that they hear, think of,
or feel. For each new thought, a student
writes a new item in the list. After the
listening, the teacher then can ask stu-
dents to share the items on their list with
each other. The sharing can be done
with students in pairs or small groups,
or the teacher can ask students to share
one item from their list with the whole
class.
When students learn of the various
items that other students have written,
their own understanding of the music
is enriched. A student may not have
heard something, thought of something,
or felt something that a fellow student
heard, thought, or felt. At that point,
the students are ready to listen to the
music again, this time mindful of what
the other students heard. It is the diver-
sity of student responses that enable
students to learn new ways of listening
from each other.
In Figures 1 and 2 are excerpts from
listening lists created by students while
listening to the first movement of Bar-
tok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The lists in
Figure 1 are by two fifth-grade students
in a general music class, and in Figure 2
are lists from two college students in a
music appreciation class for non–music
majors.
All four students are fluent listen-
ers in that they were all able to gener-
ate many items in their lists. Although
there are some similarities among the
lists, each student wrote about differ-
ent aspects while listening, indicative of
their unique musical experiences.
Listening lessons in fluency can
encourage students to delve more
deeply into music and listen to a greater
number of aspects. Over time, the teach-
ing of fluency can be sequenced by ask-
ing students to increase the minimum
number of items in their lists from, say,
at least five to seven to ten or more. The
teacher can also vary the music’s style
and increase the length of the piece.
Flexibility
A flexible thinker is able to think of
many different kinds of possible ideas
in response to a question, problem, or
situation. To contrast flexibility with flu-
ency, consider the following example.
A fluent thinker, when asked where to
go for lunch, might think of five possi-
bilities, but they might all be hamburger
joints. A flexible thinker, when faced
with the same question, might think of
Mexican, sushi, pizza, BBQ, and vegan
restaurants. A flexible listener is able to
hear, think of, and feel many different
kinds of things while listening to music.
In the first example in Figure 1, the
fifth-grade student was able to shift
attention among timbre (“strings” and
Music Educators Journal  March 2017
 lists created by hundreds of students in
FIGURE 1 elementary school, high school, and col-
lege. I found that all the items students
Two Excerpts of Listening Lists from Fifth Grade Students list could fit one of the categories in
Figure 3.
strings sounds like violins To teach flexibility in listening, a
teacher can ask students to listen to a
minor in the beginning sounds like fantasia music
piece of music and write at least one
has a refrain gets kind of scary thing that they hear, think of, or feel
flutes sounds like someone is going to in several of the categories in Figure
pause get killed 3. For example, the students could be
a lot of drums . . . asked to write at least one thing they
crescendo . . .
notice about the rhythm, one thing they
notice about the timbre, and one image
or story they imagine. Note that the
directions for teaching flexibility do not
lead to right or wrong answers. Students
FIGURE 2 are not asked to identify the meter or
the specific timbres they hear; rather,
Two Excerpts of Listening Lists from College Students they are asked to note something about
the categories of rhythm and timbre.
low strings intro somber powerful Regarding the rhythm, for example, one
high strings continue dissonance during flute melody student might notice that the music is
woodwinds and something parallel fifths
fast, another might notice that the music
perked interest has a steady beat, and another might
harp notice that it would be fun to dance to.
repeat kind of like a butterfly who just After the listening, the teacher can ask
downward melody . . . emerged from its cocoon . . . students to share what they heard with
each other and then provide students
with the opportunity to listen again.
Listening lessons in flexibility help
students to engage the music they listen
to on many different levels. For exam-
ple, a student who only listens to music
FIGURE 3
in terms of its lyrics or program can
Categories for Flexible Listening learn to listen for other musical aspects
as well. Most collegiate aural skills
Rhythm Timbre classes focus students entirely on pitch
and rhythm, two musical characteristics
Melody Process (repeat, contrast, imitate)
that can be notated, but flexible listen-
Harmony Image or story ing lessons would encourage students
Texture Emotion to engage more fully with other aspects
Dynamics Style or context of music. To develop students’ flexibility
further, teachers can increase the num-
Form Judgment
ber of categories that students list, use
different styles of music, and ask stu-
dents to choose the categories.

“flutes”), harmony (“minor”), form
(“beginning” and “refrain”), and dynam-
ics (“pause” and “crescendo”). The sec-
ond student’s list in Figure 1 illustrates a
similar degree of flexibility: timbre (“vio-
lins” and “drums”), style (“fantasia”),
emotion (“scary”), image (“someone[’s]
going to get killed”), and texture (“a lot
of . . . ”).
In Figure 3 is a list of twelve charac-
teristics of music or responses to music. I
developed this list by analyzing listening
Elaboration
An elaborative thinker is able to embel-
lish, expand, or notice combinations of
ideas. To return to the previous lunch
example, an elaborative thinker could
provide a variety of reasons for going to

www.nafme.org 49
a particular restaurant (e.g., the menu,
the service, the location). In applying
this concept to music listening, an elab-
orative listener is one who can hear,
think of, or feel combinations of simul-
taneous aspects while listening to music.
For example, the phrase “loud trumpet
sounds scary” indicates that a student is
listening to the dimensions of dynamics,
timbre, and emotion at the same time.
It is this aspect of simultaneity that dis-
tinguishes elaboration from fluency and
flexibility.
Evidence of students’ elaborative lis-
tening can be found in the items that
they write that combine multiple musi-
cal categories. In the first example in
Figure 2, the student’s first comment,
“low strings intro somber,” illustrates a
high degree of elaboration by combin-
ing four different categories of music:
pitch (“low”), timbre (“strings”), form
(“intro”), and emotion (“somber”). Two
other items on this list are elaborative:
“high strings continue” (pitch, timbre,
and process) and “woodwinds and
something perked interest” (timbre and
emotion). The second list in Figure 2
includes only a single elaborative item:
“dissonance during flute melody” (har-
mony and timbre).
One way to encourage elaborative
listening is to select music with con-
trasting sections and then ask students
at the point of the change to write as
many simultaneous changes that they
hear, think of, or feel. For example, stu-
dents might note that between the verse
and chorus of a song, the music gets
louder, changes the melody, has more
instruments, and feels more powerful.
After the listening, the teacher then asks
students to share what they heard with
each other. To help students progress
as elaborative listeners, the teacher can
use music with subtler changes and in
varying styles.
Originality
An original thinker is able to think of
unique ideas in response to a question,
problem, or situation. When faced with
the question of where to eat lunch, the
original thinker might suggest getting
50
animal crackers and eating at a zoo. An
original listener is able to hear, think of,
or feel unique aspects while listening to
music.
In applying this concept to a music
class, the uniqueness of a student’s idea
is determined by its uniqueness within
the context of the other students of the
class. One way to encourage original
listening is to ask students while listen-
ing to music to write at least one thing
that they hear, think of, or feel that they
think no one else in the class will write.
Students can then be asked to share their
ideas with the rest of the class to find
out how original their ideas are. This
type of thinking stimulates the opposite
of convergent thinking, in which a sin-
gle correct answer is the desired result.
In Figure 2, the image of a butterfly
emerging from a cocoon would have
likely been unique among the students
in the class.
The teaching of music listening as a
creative activity encourages students to
listen to music in deeper, more com-
plex ways. It does so by focusing on
various process-oriented ways of listen-
ing through the development of fluency
(more ideas), flexibility (different kinds
of ideas), elaboration (ideas in combi-
nation), and originality (unique ideas).
Assessing students’ creative listening
is a matter of examining the processes
that students use while listening rather
than the correctness of their answers: For
fluency, how many ideas can a student
generate when listening? For flexibility,
how many different musical categories
(Figure 3) can a student use when listen-
ing? For elaboration, how many simul-
taneous changes can a student perceive
while listening? For originality, how
unique are a student’s ideas when lis-
tening? Each student has a unique lis-
tening profile, employing some creative
processes more than others.
Teaching creative listening requires
the same sort of finesse as nurturing stu-
dent composers or improvisers. When
students share with the class something
they thought of while listening, they are
imparting a unique piece of themselves.
If a teacher were to correct a student
response or ask a student to explain or
defend a response, it is likely that the
student would cease to contribute, just
as the listener in the “ListeningCheck”
vignette tuned out. The teacher’s role
in teaching creative listening is vital
in encouraging deeper, more complex
ways of listening but not necessarily in
serving as a fact-checker. In education,
there is a time for correct answers and
a time for the free rein of imagination.
Pedagogical Considerations
There are many advantages to teaching
creative listening; here are a few:
1. Creative listening allows for multiple
student outcomes, with all students
able to achieve and demonstrate
learning at their own level.
2. Creative listening rewards student
diversity rather than uniformity.
When students share their various
ideas with each other, their future
listening is enriched by the multi-
plicity of other ideas that their class-
mates had.
3. Creative listening employs higher-
level thinking skills. In effect, each
creative listening activity presents a
problem to be solved, and students
develop their own unique strategies
to solve the problem.
4. Creative listening provides for a
more authentic listening experience.
Regardless of these advantages, the
teaching of music listening requires both
convergent and divergent listening. Stu-
dents cannot think creatively unless
they have concepts to think about. In
Figures 1 and 2, words like woodwinds,
dissonance, and crescendo are learned
concepts, taught through convergent lis-
tening lessons. Creative listening experi-
ences enable students to combine these
concepts in personally meaningful ways.
Perhaps our best guide to the teach-
ing of music listening comes to us
from more than two centuries ago. The
famous eighteenth-century philosopher
Immanuel Kant wrote that our judgment
of beauty in works of art is based on the
free play between understanding and
imagination.14 He said that understand-
ing is a matter of developing concepts
Music Educators Journal  March 2017
(e.g., convergent listening) and that
imagination is a means for personally
combining concepts (e.g., creative lis-
tening). Both understanding and imagi-
nation complement each other and are
necessary components in our under-
standing and valuing of works of art. In
our own time, the teaching of music lis-
tening has focused on conceptual devel-
opment and has been missing a crucial
piece. The teaching of imaginative, crea-
tive listening is the missing element.
Notes
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at School,” Early Childhood Education
Journal 35, no. 5 (2008): 439–44;
Wendy L. Sims, “The Effect of High
Versus Low Teacher Affect and Passive
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Attention, Piece Preference, Time Spent
Listening, and Piece Recognition,”
www.nafme.org
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3. Harris Interactive, “Generation M: Media
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6. Thomas A. Regelski, Teaching General
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8. Lenora Coffin, Edwin N. C. Barnes, and
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Music Educators Journal 40, no. 6
(1954): 23–25.
10. Saul Feinberg, “Creative Problem-Solving
and the Music Listening Experience,”
Music Educators Journal 61, no. 1
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11. Robert E. Dunn, “Creative Thinking and
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Listening,” Arts Education Policy
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13. Peter R. Webster, “Creativity as Creative
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Accessed May 27, 2016, http://oll.liberty
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51