How to Listen to Instrumental Music
Did you know you could increase your enjoyment, produce intense pleasure, and develop a love, an interest for instrumental music? It is true. You only have to know how to listen.
Instrumental music has a definition: sounds organized and intellectually placed, intended to produce an emotional response from the listener.
A well know American composer and music administrator, William Schuman, says, “Listening to music is a skill that is acquired through experience and learning. Knowledge enhances enjoyment.” Listening is a skill, a craft that needs, desires, and wants to be developed. It produces knowledge. In the case of music: knowledge of music. You will receive more pleasure from music as you listen and increase your knowledge of it. By being an active listener, you will learn the craft of music composition.
Pay attention, be an active listener. Play your favorite music instrumental. Are you listening? Are you paying attention to everything going on? Are you being sensitive, open, and honest about how the music makes you feel, think, and listen?
For you to listen to instrumental music and find enjoyment you must understand its key parts: the composer, the performer, and the listener. The composer is the great mind. The performer is the immense talent. The listener is you. The music is at your mercy, you are its critic, its executioner, its exaltation. You are why it exists. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it exist? Of course, but to whom?
Widen your exposure to instrumental music. Do not limit yourself. Listen to the past. Listen to the present. Listen to different cultures, different genres, different tempos and beats. Set no limits.
Keep technicalities at bay. Do not get caught up in the details. It is simply not important how many vibrations a note produces. There is no value as a listener to know such technicalities. They are obstacles that keep you from active listening, from enjoying yourself. It is more important, more enjoyable, to be sensitive to the music’s tones, its vibrations. Become conscious and wide-awake. It is the only true way to listen to instrumental music.
Licensing Instrumental Music in TV and Films
Lately I’ve been receiving quite a few emails regarding whether or not there is a need for instrumental music in TV, Film, etc. The simple answer is yes! There are opportunities for both instrumental and vocal music. Some production libraries only work with instrumental music, some only work with vocal music and many place both. It’s a simple matter of doing a little research and figuring out who needs what and submitting your music accordingly.
I should point out that instrumental placements tend to generate smaller performance royalties than songs with vocals. Sometimes they generate substantially less. Song placements are put into one of several categories by the show’s music supervisor, based on how prominent, or not prominent, the song is used. This information is entered onto what’s known as a cue sheet that is then submitted to the appropriate Performing Rights Organization. Songs with vocals tend to be considered more prominent whereas instrumental songs generally are considered to be “background” placements. The more prominently a song is featured, the larger the royalty that is generated.
And speaking of instrumental music, it’s a good idea to always have an instrumental version of each of your songs when you’re shopping them around for licensing opportunities. Occasionally songs will be licensed and either the vocal will be re-cut or the instrumental version of the song will be used instead of the vocal version. So, be prepared for these different potential scenarios by having an instrumental version of your song ready to go!
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The Heresy of Instrumental Music in Public Worship
With reference to the time when organs were first introduced into use in the Roman Catholic Church, let us hear Bingham:1 “It is now generally agreed among learned men that the use of organs came into the church since the time of Thomas Aquinas, Anno 1250; for he, in his Summs, has these words: ‘Our church does not use musical instruments, as harps and psalteries, to praise God withal, that she may not seem to Judaize.’”…Mr. Wharton also has observed that Marinus Sanutus, who lived about the year 1290, was the first who brought the use of wind-organs into churches, whence he was surnamed Torcellus, which is the name for an organ in the Italian tongue….Let us pause a moment to notice the fact, supported by a mass of incontrovertible evidence, that the Christian church did not employ instrumental music in its public worship for 1200 years after Christ….
It deserves serious consideration, moreover, that notwithstanding the ever-accelerated drift towards corruption in worship as well as in doctrine and government, the Roman Catholic Church did not adopt this corrupt practice until about the middle of the thirteenth century….When the organ was introduced into its worship it encountered strong opposition, and made its way but slowly to general acceptance. These assuredly are facts that should profoundly impress Protestant churches. How can they adopt a practice which the Roman Church, in the year 1200, had not admitted…Then came the Reformation; and the question arises, How did the Reformers deal with instrumental music in the church?…Zwingle has already been quoted to show instrumental music was one of the shadows of the old law which has been realized in the gospel. He pronounces its employment in the present dispensation “wicked pervicacity.” There is no doubt in regard to his views on the subject, which were adopted by the Swiss Reformed churches…
Calvin is very express in his condemnation of instrumental music in connection with the public worship of the Christian church…In his homily on 1 Sam. xviii. 1-9, he delivers himself emphatically and solemnly upon the subject: “In Popery there was a ridiculous and unsuitable imitation [of the Jews]. While they adorned their temples, and valued themselves as having made the worship of God more splendid and inviting, they employed organs, and many other such ludicrous things, by which the Word and worship of God are exceedingly profaned, the people being much more attached to those rites than to the understanding of the divine Word…”
Whatever may be the practice in recent times of the churches of Holland, the Synods of the Reformed Dutch Church, soon after the Reformation, pronounced very decidedly against the use of instrumental music in public worship. The National Synod at Middleburg, in 1581, declared against it, and the Synod of Holland and Zealand, in 1594, adopted this strong resolution; “That they would endeavor to obtain of the magistrate the laying aside of organs, and the singing with them in the churches….” The Provincial Synod of Dort also inveighed severely against their use…The Rev. Charles H. Spurgeon,…upholds an apostolic simplicity of worship. The great congregation which is blessed with the privilege of listening to his instructions has no organ “to assist” them in singing…The non-prelatic churches, Independent and Presbyterian, began their development on the American continent without instrumental music. They followed the English Puritans and the Scottish Church, which had adopted the principles of the Calvinistic Reformed Church…
It has thus been proved by an appeal to historical facts, that the church, although lapsing more and more into defection from the truth and into a corruption of apostolic practice, had no instrumental music for twelve hundred years; and that the Calvinistic Reformed Church ejected it from its services as a element of Popery, even the Church of England having come very nigh to its extrusion from her worship. The historical argument, therefore, combines with the scriptural and the confessional to raise a solemn and powerful protest against its employment by the Presbyterian Church. It is heresy in the sphere of worship.