Most musicians are so focused on making music that they forget the one thing that makes a musician better faster than almost anything else: listening. Not passively, not as background noise, but with the same seriousness and intent you bring to your instrument.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: A compelling case for why listening is not a supplement to musical practice but the core of it, along with specific listening recommendations to get you started.
The printer who never reads
Imagine you run a printing press in the 16th century. You’re brilliant at the craft — your typesetting is perfect, your ink application is flawless, your binding is immaculate. But you never read the books you print. You’re a tradesperson, not a thinker. Now imagine a writer who never reads other writers — where would the ideas come from? How would they even know whether their ideas were original? The same is true for musicians: if you’re always playing and never listening, you’re printing without reading. The craft might be good, but it has no context, no history, no depth to draw from.
Listening as an act of love
Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship contains a passage where the protagonist expresses the feeling that because he loves someone deeply, he resents every moment of their life he wasn’t a part of — and wants to know their entire history to truly know them. The same logic applies to music. If you love music but have no interest in its history — if you only know the music that exists in your own lifetime and genre — then you’re not really loving music. You’re loving a tiny sliver of it. Real love requires knowing the whole person, the whole history.
You can’t write a book without reading. Well, how would you? Where would the ideas come from?
Why history matters for musicians
Music is an auditory art, which means you can only know its history by listening to it. You can read about Beethoven or Mahler, but until you’ve actually heard the music, you don’t know it. And without that knowledge you’re working in a vacuum — you think you’re saying something new when you might be unknowingly echoing something said a hundred years ago, or you’re missing an entire emotional vocabulary that’s been available to musicians for centuries.
Specific listening recommendations
In this episode, Bryan offers several concrete starting points for broadening your listening:
- String Quartets (e.g. Haydn, Mozart)
- Beethoven’s String Quartet by the Suske Quartet
- Mahler Symphony No.2
- Beethoven’s 5th Symphony
These aren’t arbitrary choices — they represent music where the construction is transparent, where you can hear how the parts interact, and where the emotional range is vast. Listening to them attentively will expand your sense of what music can do.
To get in touch with us, email principles@guitarvivo.com
Join our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/544192037278171
Taking it further: Once you’ve worked through the recommended listening, branch out into any area of music that you haven’t previously explored — whether that’s jazz, classical, folk from other cultures, or blues from earlier decades. The goal is always the same: to know the history of the thing you love.
Your homework: This week, pick one of the listening recommendations above and listen to it — not as background, but sitting down with no distractions. Afterwards, write three sentences about what you noticed: something about the rhythm, something about the melody, and something about how the piece made you feel.