The jazz educator Marc Sabatella, author of the classic Jazz Improvisation Primer, has a nice philosophical approach: all of us are musicians. Some of us are performing musicians, and some are listening musicians. I support this attitude wholeheartedly. I think that musicality is like walking and talking: almost everyone is born capable of learning how to do it. In Western civilization, we’ve developed this unfortunate idea that music is best left to a few highly specialized professionals, and that everyone else should just consume it passively. This is wrong. If you want to be a listening musician, all you have to do is learn to listen actively and imaginatively. All the technical stuff follows out of that.
The first thing to do if you want to listen like a musician is to identify the different components and be able to hear them in isolation. That might mean picking out different instruments and voices, and choosing just one to follow. More abstractly, a solo piano or guitar piece might also be comprised of different “voices,” groups of notes that form distinguishable lines. Once you learn how to follow a single voice, you can start to hear how the different voices interact with each other, rather than just perceiving the music as an undifferentiated sound mass. This is when the serious pleasure sets in.
So how do you learn to isolate the voices? Video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero work amazingly well for this purpose. A profoundly nonmusical friend of mine played through Beatles Rock Band as Paul McCartney, and said it was the first time in his life he had ever thought to pay attention to the bass parts in songs. Suddenly there was this whole new dimension to songs he had heard thousands of times. He said it was like learning how to see in color after a lifetime of black and white. Pretty powerful stuff for a video game!
Learning how to make music yourself is another excellent way to learn to listen actively. You don’t have to be amazing; even rudimentary practice as a singer or instrumentalist is enough to dramatically change the way you listen. It’s easier to learn music as a kid than as an adult, but it’s never too late to get started. There’s a dizzying variety of fun and accessible software you can try out as well. Music you make with the computer is every bit as legitimate as music you make with a piano or violin. If you have an iPad or iPhone, spend five bucks on GarageBand, it’s remarkably powerful and a lot of fun. Propellerhead Figure is pretty great too, and is only a dollar.
There are plenty of specific technical music concepts that are worth knowing about for music appreciation purposes: tension and release, time signatures and so forth. By all means, read about these things and learn to recognize them. But first, learn to listen with active engagement. See what you can find yourself. Then go out and learn the names for the patterns you find. Have fun!