Aesthetic Psychology Of Music Appreciation And Teaching Of Music Appreciation

No matter the process of music criticism or the study of music criticism, it is a complex active process which contains varieties of psychological functions. It makes it compulsory for people to consider these psychological factors as a part of research, when they are involving in the teaching of music criticism, moreover, uncover all the possible comprehensive relationships between these factors and the effects of the teaching process, and find out whether these relationships could lead to some positive revelation.The basic elements of music aesthetic psychology include attention, aesthetic expectation, aesthetic attitude, acoustic perception, imagination, emotional experience, and comprehension, etc. They construct the aesthetic psychological structure of music criticism.The aesthetic psychological process of music criticism can be divided into three stages: initialization, climax, and continuity. The initial stage is mainly concerned with aesthetic attention, expectation, and attitude; the climax stage deals with acoustic perception, intuition, imagination, emotional experience, comprehension, synesthesia, and sympathism; the continuity stage, however, refers to aesthetical criticism. There is an affinity between these factors and whether the audience could obtain a aesthetical experience and pleasure. By exploring their formative characteristics and disciplines, one could gain plenty of enlightenment about music criticism education. For instance, according to the formative conditions of aesthetical attention, one should pay more attention to the redundancy of a piece of music, when selecting a musical example for students, because the more appropriate the redundancy is, the more the students will be attracted. Another example, to help the audience to achieve more intuitionistic aesthetical experience, teacher could demonstrate with both music and pictures, by transferring auditory experience to visual experience, thus students could reach abetter understanding of music.Based on the importance of cognition, one should realize the indispensability of music theory education, which could limit the quality of acoustic perception, imagination and emotional experience, etc.. Discovering more musical aesthetical psychological disciplines, and establishing more music criticism education methods developed from these disciplines, is still a part of a larger interdisciplinary effort by all the music educationers.