Music — Brazen Providence 5 Artists You Should Know In 2011 The hits just keep on coming — so much excellent music rolls out each week that it can be hard just to keep up. In 2011, Bon Iver, Wilco, Raphael Saadiq, The Decemberists, Gillian Welch, Tinariwen, Elbow, Tom Waits and Fleet Foxes all met high expectations. Shabazz Palaces, James Blake and Wild Flag dropped highly anticipated debuts that lived up to the advance buzz. Charles Bradley came out of nowhere, stripping his heart and soul bare on his debut album (No Time for Dreaming) at age 61. And legendary funk guitarist Dennis Coffey descended from cloud nine and a 20-year hiatus to lay down some wicked new original tracks. In 2011, even with more outlets than ever for discovering and sharing new music, it's nearly impossible for even the most dedicated music lover to keep up.
How to Listen to Music: A Vintage Guide to the 7 Essential Skills by Maria Popova “Respond esthetically to all sounds, from the hum of the refrigerator motor or the paddling of oars on a lake, to the tones of a cello or muted trumpet.” Music has a powerful grip on our emotional brain. From the wonderful vintage book Music: Ways of Listening, originally published in 1982, comes this outline of the seven essential skills of perceptive listening, which author and composer Elliott Schwartz argues have been “dulled by our built-in twentieth-century habit of tuning out” and thus need to be actively developed. Develop your sensitivity to music. Music: Ways of Listening is to listening what Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is to reading — a timeless, yet remarkably timely meditation of a skill-intensive art we all too frequently mistake for a talent or, worse yet, a static pre-wired capacity. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: