We continue Dave Hurwitz’s master class in active listening, while enjoying the four movements of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite #1, opus 46. In our last post, we saw how great music can stand alone, needing neither words nor action to communicate powerfully.

Today, we focus on HARMONY. Harmony can be intimidating. We just need to actively listen to the harmonies doing what they do. As Dave explains, nobody really knows why harmonies make us feel certain ways. Our point here is to notice that they do.

0:00 Harmony can be intimidating. Dave limits the scope of his video to the active listening of harmonies. Analogy of harmony as infrastructure. Perceiving it only takes practice, not science.

5:50 In great music, harmony results in deep affect. Presenting the example of “Åse’s death” to illustrate how harmony enhances a very simple melody.

9:05 first layer of listening. Harmony acts as punctuation for the melody: we will listen to a “comma”, then a “period”.

11:50 reversing a simple melody also creates affect.

13:08 listening back-to-back to the melody rightside up, then upside down, to define this reversing.

15:20 listen to whole movement (4 minutes) now that the melody and its reversing has been identified in our minds. We can now focus on harmonies.

20:00 reviewing the point of previous video (music and words, melodrama) and how this movement reinforces that point (listen to to how the music is used in the play at 23:00)

24:30 Camille St-Saens quote* and Dave’s conclusion to invest time in active listening.

The exact quote from St Saens is below:

Music is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion (…). He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not really fond of music.

Camille St Saens, “Musical memories”

Thank you for reading, Hervé