Sound strategies

Teaching Students How to Listen in the Age of AI: Lessons from the Orchestra Podium

Ricardo Averbach

Two Classrooms, Two Kinds of Attention

Orchestra conductors are accustomed to environments where accountability is immediate. If a violinist misses an entrance, everyone hears it. If the brass misjudge a crescendo, the music itself reveals the problem.

Teaching music appreciation for non-majors can feel very different.

In the orchestra, students must play. In a general education classroom, students can more easily disappear behind laptops, phones, or increasingly, artificial-intelligence tools capable of summarizing readings or generating responses.

The result is rarely hostility toward music. More often it is something quieter: disengagement.

Yet teaching these courses reveals something essential. Music appreciation is not primarily about presenting repertoire. It is about teaching how to listen.

In that sense, the work is closely related to conducting itself. A conductor ultimately teaches musicians to listen—to one another, to balance, to texture, and to the musical architecture unfolding in time.

Listening, in other words, is the central musical skill we hope students develop.

Students listening to each other in a rehearsal setting of the Miami University Symphony Orchestra

When Everything Becomes “Entertainment”

One of the first cultural surprises in the music appreciation classroom is linguistic. In everyday conversation, almost every cultural activity is described as “entertainment.”

A Mahler symphony, a Broadway production, a movie soundtrack concert, and a superhero film may all be discussed using the same vocabulary.

Enjoyment, of course, is essential to musical life. Yet when every experience becomes entertainment, we gradually lose the language needed to describe works that demand sustained attention.

Entertainment typically offers immediate and predictable pleasure. Works of art often require patience. They reward repeated listening and invite deeper reflection.

Both belong in a healthy musical culture. The problem arises when we no longer recognize the difference.

Leonard Bernstein explaining the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Young People’s Concerts). This video powerfully demonstrates how guided listening transforms the way students hear a familiar work.

Inclusiveness and the Canon

Music education today rightly places great emphasis on inclusiveness. Expanding repertoire to include women composers, composers of color, and traditions beyond Europe has enriched our understanding of music and corrected genuine historical omissions.

But in some contexts the conversation frequently suggests that the traditional classical repertoire must now be approached with embarrassment or apology.

That would be a mistake.

Inclusiveness should expand the conversation, not replace it. Beethoven and Florence Price, Monteverdi and Duke Ellington, can coexist within a curriculum that treats each as worthy of serious listening and thoughtful study.

The goal is not substitution but integration.

Sample of Miami University Symphony Orchestra program integrating inclusiveness.

Trivia vs. Musical Knowledge

Another challenge in today’s classrooms is the growing confusion between information about music and understanding in music.

Students have unprecedented access to information. Within seconds they can retrieve dates, anecdotes, and biographical facts: Beethoven was born in Bonn, The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, Mozart composed more than 600 works. Yet these facts exist largely outside the listening experience.

Musical understanding involves different capacities: recognizing motives, hearing phrase structures, following harmonic motion, perceiving changes in orchestration, and tracing how musical ideas develop across time.

Trivia describes music from the outside. Knowledge operates within the act of listening itself.

The distinction becomes clear when comparing two kinds of students. One may list biographical details about Beethoven. Another can recognize the opening motive of the Eroica Symphony when it reappears later in the movement, hearing how it has been transformed through harmony and orchestration.

The second student possesses the kind of understanding music education ultimately seeks to cultivate.

When Everything Becomes a “Song”

A small linguistic habit illustrates this issue clearly. Many students refer to nearly every musical work as a “song.” Symphonies are songs. Gregorian chants are songs. Individual movements of a string quartet become songs.

In casual speech this may seem harmless. In an educational setting, however, terminology shapes perception.

The word song carries specific assumptions: a voice, a text, a melody supported by accompaniment. When applied indiscriminately to instrumental repertoire, it encourages listeners to approach music primarily as melody and mood rather than as structured musical thought.

Different genres invite different listening strategies. A Schubert Lied depends on the interaction between poetry and musical setting. A symphonic movement unfolds through large-scale motivic and harmonic processes. A fugue explores contrapuntal relationships among independent voices.

When every work becomes simply a “song,” these distinctions disappear—and with them the listening skills needed to perceive the music on its own terms.

Often, a brief but compelling clarification of terminology can transform how students listen.

“I Don’t Like Bach”

Another familiar moment occurs when students are invited to respond to a piece of music.

At first, the classroom is usually quiet. But when prompted, a comment eventually appears: “I don’t really like it.”

Or sometimes, “Classical music feels kind of dead.”

Similar sentiments circulate in popular culture. Actor Timothée Chalamet recently remarked that classical music can feel distant or lifeless to younger generations.

Such reactions are understandable. Many students simply have had little opportunity to become familiar with the musical language of the repertoire.

If someone spends five minutes scanning a page of calculus and concludes that mathematics is uninteresting, we recognize the problem immediately: the subject requires familiarity before meaningful evaluation becomes possible.

Many musical works function similarly. Symphonies and fugues were not designed for instant comprehension. Their expressive logic emerges through repeated listening and guided attention.

The educator’s task is therefore not to persuade students that they must enjoy the repertoire. Rather, it is to slow the rush to judgment and create the conditions for deeper listening.

Why Music Education Matters

All of these challenges point toward a larger issue. Serious musical culture depends on forms of attention that are increasingly rare in a digital environment.

Listening carefully.

Following musical development.

Returning to a work multiple times.

Music education exists partly to protect these habits.

Our task is not to defend classical music out of nostalgia, nor to shame students into admiring it. Instead, we invite them into a deeper encounter with sound, structure, and meaning.

As Igor Stravinsky once observed:

“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead.”

Love, in this sense, means curiosity, familiarity, and the willingness to listen long enough for music to reveal what it is doing.

Students always have the right to their first reaction.

Our responsibility as teachers is to give them the tools so that their last reaction is more informed than their first.

Ricardo Averbach is Director of Orchestral Studies at Miami University, Past President of the College Orchestra Directors Association (CODA) and winner of the 2025 American Prize in Orchestra Performance.

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