Purpose

Music In Aaron Copland¡¦s essay How We Listen to Music, he examines the three ways people listen to music. He calls the ways we listen to music ¡§planes¡¨. The three planes he examines are the Sensuous Plane, Expressive Plane, and Sheerly Musical Plane (400). He uses examples of each plane and how people use it. The Sensuous Plane is used just for the pleasure of musical sound. People turn it on just to have something …

…happens to be what the composer/song writer is usually criticized for, i.e. Marilyn Manson and Eminem. At the end of his essay Copland says that people don¡¦t listen to one plane or another, rather we listen to all three at the same time. ¡§Actually, we never listen on one or the other of these planes. What we do is to correlate them „o listening in all three ways at the same time,¡¨ (404).