Appreciating Music: What is it and how can we teach it?

To appreciate a piece of music involves experiencing it in a way we as music listeners find rewarding. This study aims at a better understanding of music appreciation by asking these questions:

• What are the ways in which we may hear a piece of music with appreciation and how do these ways differ from each other?
• In particular, what kinds of thought inform their appreciation when we listen to our favourite music?
• Do these thoughts reflect objective features of the music or are they more adequately construed as our personal projections onto the music?

Once a better understanding of the nature music appreciation is available, the question will be how to use this understanding in teaching music.