Grade 7 · printable course

Listening Across Cultures: An Introduction to Music Appreciation

Grade 7 · 219 pages · 36 lessons · PDF, print at home

A semester course in active listening. Students learn to name what changes and repeats in music, using the elements of music as vocabulary. They study traditions from at least four continents as equally serious art, examine how instruments and ensembles produce sound, and trace a light history thread from early notated music through recorded and electronic music. The course ends with a curated, defended playlist. No instrument or reading of notation is required or assumed.

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What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

Listening Across Cultures: An Introduction to Music Appreciation

36 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: Learning to Listen: The Elements of Music9 lessons
  1. 1.The distinction between beat (the steady pulse) and tempo (the speed of that pulse)
  2. 2.Melody as the foreground line a listener follows, distinct from accompanying harmony
  3. 3.The relationship between a specific dynamic or tempo change and the expressive effect it produces
  4. 4.Texture types distinguished by number and independence of audible pitch layers
  5. 5.Timbre as the audible quality that distinguishes sound sources of the same pitch and volume
  6. 6.Musical form as a pattern of repeated (same-letter) and contrasting (different-letter) sections
  7. 7.Element changes (tempo, dynamics, texture, form) occurring in an unfamiliar recording
  8. 8.The standard of evidence linking a verbal claim about music to a specific, checkable moment in a recording
  9. 9.The general routine of citing specific, verifiable evidence for a claim about any piece of music
Unit 2: Listening Across Continents9 lessons
  1. 10.Call-and-response structure in Sub-Saharan African ensemble music
  2. 11.Drone and cyclic form as structural devices
  3. 12.The relationship between perceived simplicity and musical complexity in drone-based traditions
  4. 13.Shared and differing structural elements across two of the four traditions
  5. 14.Timestamp citation as evidence for a structural claim
  6. 15.Structural cues distinguishing the four studied traditions
  7. 16.The fairness and validity of cross-cultural musical comparison
  8. 17.The relationship between social/ritual function and musical structure
  9. 18.Definitions of call-and-response, drone, and cyclic form
Unit 3: How Sound Is Made: Instruments and Ensembles9 lessons
  1. 19.The five instrument families defined by vibrating mechanism (aerophone, chordophone, membranophone, idiophone, electrophone)
  2. 20.Timbre as an audible clue to an instrument's vibrating mechanism
  3. 21.The distinction between playing technique and vibrating mechanism
  4. 22.The five instrument families defined by vibrating mechanism, applied beyond taught examples
  5. 23.Ensemble roles of melody, harmony, and rhythm within a multi-instrument texture
  6. 24.The relationship between an ensemble's function or cultural setting and the instrument families it favors
  7. 25.The general logic of classifying any sound source by its vibrating mechanism, extended beyond the five named families
  8. 26.The five instrument family names and one example each
  9. 27.The audible evidence (specific timbral feature) that supports an instrument-family classification
Unit 4: A Century of Change: Recording, Electronic Music, and Your Playlist9 lessons
  1. 28.The three-era timeline (common-practice, recorded, electronic) and their audible cues
  2. 29.The effect of recording technology on the listening experience, contrasted across two eras
  3. 30.Sampling as a transformation of a prior recording
  4. 31.Transfer of era- and instrument-family-diagnostic listening to unfamiliar material
  5. 32.A curated multi-era, multi-continent playlist with an internal organizing rationale
  6. 33.The relationship between a specific audible moment and the broader structural or expressive claim it supports
  7. 34.The accessibility-versus-disposability argument about recording technology
  8. 35.Definitions of the three named eras
  9. 36.The electrophone classification of early electronic instruments introduced in this unit

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