Based on twenty years of pedagogical and curricular development for college courses in so-called “world music,” this book proposes a method — for musicians, educators, and any willing listener — to engage with unfamiliar music on its own terms. Much of the difficulty we face when we encounter unfamiliar styles of music stems from the fact that whether we know it or not, we often ask music to do things for our ears and brains that the music perhaps wasn’t meant to do. This book proposes a set of mental, aural, and attitudinal tools — a disposition — to help us approach music with a desire to understand it from the standpoint of someone who already gets it. This method doesn’t require extensive technical training in this or that musical system, be it the harmonic structures of Western classical music, the modal nuances of Indian raga, or the rhythmic particularity of West African drumming. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt theory and music education, the SCR/EAM method helps us to open our ears as if we knew all that. It asks us to listen with the ears of someone already predisposed to engage with the music—someone for whom that music is normal. It takes a familiar, oppositional question — Why would anyone listen to that? — and turns it on its head: Someone really loves listening to that; I wonder why.