Aural Education

Reconceptualising Ear Training in Higher Music Learning

Monika Andrianopoulou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000693218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Aural Education: Reconceptualising Ear Training in Higher Music Learning explores the practice of musical 'aural training' from historical, pedagogical, psychological, musicological, and cultural perspectives, and uses these to draw implications for its pedagogy, particularly within the context of higher music education.

The multi-perspective approach adopted by the author affords a broader and deeper understanding of this branch of music education, and of how humans relate to music more generally. The book extracts and examines one by one different parameters that appear central to 'aural training', proceeding in a gradual and well-organised way, while at the same time constantly highlighting the multiple interconnections and organic unity of the many different operations that take place when we interact with music through any music-related activity. The resulting complex profile of the nature of our relationship with music, combined with an exploration of non-Western cultural perspectives, offer fresh insights on issues relating to musical 'aural training'. Emerging implications are proposed in the form of broad pedagogical principles, applicable in a variety of different music educational settings.

Andrianopoulou propounds a holistic alternative to 'aural training', which acknowledges the richness of our relationship to music and is rooted in absorbed aural experience. The book is a key contribution to the existing literature on aural education, designed with researchers and educators in mind.

1 Introduction

How it all started

Personal beginnings

I believe I have always felt music to be an internal affair, something that I could joyfully carry with me at all times, regardless of sound source availability. I started learning the piano around the age of seven, after having watched and heard my sister play for about a year, during which I longed to learn too. Later, I remember relishing the possibilities for expressivity that playing music offered (although I may not have framed it in such language at the time), and enjoying a great sense of satisfaction with the involvement of my whole body and my sense of hearing while playing. I was taught to read music right from the start, but outside the lesson I liked to pick out familiar tunes on the piano and to create some of my own. Besides these endeavours, and without realising exactly when or how this started, I acquired the habit of internally ‘playing along’ music that I heard around me in neutral everyday moments – in the car, in shops, or at home, and trying to work out what the notes and underlying harmonies might be. I spontaneously used a movable-do system, without being aware of its formal existence back then; it was a kind of internal game, a private hobby.

This game, of constantly practising relative pitch perception for my own pleasure, gave me an advantage when it came to attending early solfège and dictation classes as a young music learner, in the context of formal music education. Accepting the premise that aural awareness – or ‘a good “musical ear”’ – underpins all musical activity (Wright, 2016, p. xxii), the effects of this habit most likely empowered my musical life in general, and still do. It is not possible to evaluate with any exactness the role it played in enabling me to study piano performance in Greece and in England; subsequently, I was delighted to discover and attend graduate music studies that actually centred on ‘Solfège’ – incorporating dictation – at the Kodály Institute in Kecskemet, Hungary.¹ Soon afterwards, these activities became central in my own professional life, when I was hired to teach the course of ‘Ear Training-Solfège-Rhythmic Training’ in the Department of Music Science and Art, at the University of Macedonia, Greece.

Teaching ‘ear training’ in higher music education in Greece

The Department of Music Science and Art (DMSA) was founded in 1996, and it is the youngest of four university music departments in Greece. Its curriculum is oriented towards an integration of theoretical knowledge with practical musicianship, aiming to turn out ‘well-rounded musicians and artists’ through offering a combination of ‘historical, theoretical, practical, and pedagogical’ musical studies.² Furthermore, wishing to embrace both Eastern and Western elements of the musical inheritance of modern-day Greece, the department offers study majors in four different musical domains – each with its own vast landscape of necessary theoretical knowledge and artistic skill, namely: (i) European (classical) Music major, (ii) Byzantine Music major, (iii) Greek Traditional (folk) Music major, and (iv) Contemporary Music (=composition) major. The plurality of majors and specialisations within these, combined with the overall effort to apply an integrated approach covering both practical and theoretical elements, is translated into a broad and diverse curriculum, which appeals to students of equally diverse musical fields, levels, and interests. The resulting plurality of courses, teaching approaches, and music education cultures is one of the aspects that make up the department’s individual ethos.

The DMSA accepted its first students in September 1998. Notably, ‘ear training’, namely a specific course for practising music listening and reading skills, did not figure in the department’s study programme from the beginning; it was added early on, due to perceived weaknesses that instrumental tutors detected on the part of many students in various required musical tasks. These included to sing a tonal melody before playing it on one’s instrument, such as to understand its expressive peak better; to monitor one’s intonation, or to feel and perform successfully a complex rhythm.³ At first, the course lasted for two semesters across one year, which soon extended to four across two. Initially, it was compulsory only for students of the two majors which deal with Western music (European classical and contemporary), whilst it was offered as an elective for students of the other two majors (Byzantine and Greek traditional). Recently, however, a decision has been taken to make the course compulsory for all students.

The decision for the introduction of an ‘ear-training’ course after ascertaining students’ weaknesses, its expansion from two to four semesters, and its inclusion as a compulsory aspect in all majors and specialisations, constitute the opposite trend to that which has prevailed in some British universities, where the course has been abolished altogether to make room for other classes (e.g. see Wright, 2016). Its role, as reportedly envisioned by the DMSA’s instrumental tutors who decided to include it in the curriculum, must have been to help build or reinforce some of what were apparently considered to be basic skills for any musician, no matter what the reasons were that students were not already equipped with these.

I was hired to teach the ‘Ear Training-Solfège-Rhythmic Training’ course at the DMSA in 2006. As there was no pre-existing curriculum and no teaching guidelines given either by the department or by the Ministry of Education, I had complete freedom in choosing the content and methodology of the course. The single common denominator that was sought in all materials and approaches used in class was that they should feel relevant to the students, and constitute real musical experiences, rather than somewhat dry and isolated activities likely to be dismissed from memory once the course was completed. The process of seeking to design a course that would be interesting, meaningful, relevant, and enjoyable to students, while aiming to train specific skills – a rather narrow goal in itself – generated a number of questions and concerns. These regarded issues such as how to succeed in constructing a course that would appeal to both aurally ‘strong’ and weaker students; how to link what we did in class with students’ wider musical activity; how to create musically meaningful experiences while utilising by necessity mostly short extracts and isolated materials; how to equally develop all the different skills we were working on – to do with melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic perception – in the short time available, and, how to make room for enjoyment of the activities involved, when emphasis on intellectual understanding meant constantly ‘freezing’ the music in order to analyse.

Such concerns led to a broader and overarching question, which could simply be put as ‘What is this course trying to do?’ It seemed as if the course was trying to do so much at once, that it was hard to circumscribe its logic and its objective. At the same time, I had a nagging feeling that, at this phase of music education, the specific training of various different skills such as sight-singing, taking dictation, or playing and singing short musical extracts, seemed an artificial and out-of-place approach. Indeed, there were always a few select students to whom it appeared that the course had literally nothing to offer, as their skills were already well developed. On the other hand, others did need work on basic skills (such as singing in tune or decoding notated rhythm) and openly expressed their satisfaction to be learning and improving, while most were good at some things and less so at others. Thus, from the start, teaching this course was anything but straightforward: both subject matter and receivers’ needs were extremely diverse and hard to ‘pigeonhole’. Familiarisation with relevant literature, especially texts written by aural instructors (e.g. Ilomäki, 2011; Klonoski, 2006; McNeil, 2000; Pratt, 1998; Wright, 2016), made me realise that I was not alone in feeling these frustrations.

Embarking on research

It was my own need to understand this situation better, and find ways of constructing a more relevant, enjoyable, and effective course, that led to the research presented in this book. I decided to study the ‘phenomenon’ of ‘ear-training’ courses from different angles, beginning with its historical birth and evolution (Chapter 2) and proceeding to examine opinions, approaches, and concerns regarding its pedagogy, as reflected in recent and current writings on ‘aural training’ (Chapter 3). The initial literature review revealed the astonishing breadth of this singular branch of music education. Across the various texts, ‘ear training’ was associated with a wide range of topics, relating to different areas of knowledge and/or ability. These were viewed as central educational benefits, desired aims, or problematic aspects that needed to be addressed: the enhancement of general musicianship and musical understanding, the ‘invigoration’ of music theory, the development of musical perception, memory, literacy, and inner hearing, and the neglected role of the body in relating to music within ‘aural training’ are examples of such issues, repeatedly mentioned in the literature. Thus, reading led to the extraction of a number of wide-ranging parameters that seemed to be in various ways central to ‘ear training’. Exploring each of these individually, so as better to understand their characteristics and their implications for ‘ear-training’ pedagogy, appeared to be a possible way of tying together what largely felt like a vast and fragmented – but exciting – field. Thus, the literature review investigating these parameters, particularly from the perspective of Western classical music and music education, forms the core of this book (Chapters 4–11).

Some decades ago, when Western classical musical practices dominated formal music education in Europe, the investigation might have stopped here. Today, the plurality of musical cultures within the DMSA – similar to many other music departments around the world – and the current trend for acknowledging both formal and informal musical learning contexts (Ilomäki, 2013; Lebler, Burt-Perkins, & Carey, 2009; O’Flynn, 2006), create the need to validate, enrich, and expand the Western classical music perspective. For this reason, empirical research was undertaken within three different contexts of non-European classical music performance and practice in Greece, representing the Byzantine, Greek traditional, and jazz music cultures. Central parameters of ‘aural training’ emerging from the literature were further interrogated through interviews with a small number of musicians from each of these three cultures, being nine musicians in total (Chapter 12). The resulting blended research design has hopefully created a more complete picture as to the complex nature of relating to music and of musical ‘ear training’, and, by extension, as to implications regarding how such ‘training’ may be rendered more relevant and effective – in other words, more meaningful (Chapters 13 and 14).

‘Ear training’ is called by different names in different institutions, such as ‘musicianship’, ‘aural training’, ‘aural studies’, ‘aural skills’, etc. In this book, different titles are used interchangeably – and always in inverted commas – when referring to the course, without further explanation, e.g. in the case of ‘aural skills’, of exactly what the phrase designates. Rather than attempting to define ‘aural skills’ upfront, these will be delineated in the process of exploring the underlying philosophy and different parameters of ‘aural training’, as portrayed in the literature review and the eclectic empirical study.⁴ The intention is to arrive at a more nuanced, critical, and deeper perspective by the end of the book that will both challenge a simplistic conception and also call for a new understanding and perhaps terminology when speaking about these aspects of developing musicianship, irrespective of the age group and phase of education.

Research aim and research questions

As a broad aim, this study seeks to explore the nature of musical ‘aural training’, with a view to informing and enriching its pedagogy. More specifically, it sets out to investigate a number of parameters that appear to be central to ‘aural training’, as emerging from a close study of its history and of the current discourse regarding its underlying philosophy, aims, pedagogical methods, and problems. Investigation includes historical, psychological, musicological, and pedagogical aspects. The same parameters are then further explored through interviews with nine non-Western classical musicians, belonging to the Byzantine, Greek traditional, and jazz musical cultures in Greece. The literature review and empirical study thus seek to explore the following research questions:

(1) What areas of ability and/or knowledge are considered central parameters of ‘aural training’ in the literature?

(2) What are the particular features of each of these parameters that could possibly act as guides to constructing meaningful ‘ear-training’ courses?

(3) Are such features applicable in a diverse range of musical genres?

(4) What conclusions may be drawn for ‘aural training’ pedagogy?

Figure 1.1 summarises the steps through which the present research progressed in order to address these questions, and presents a chapter outline of the book.

Figure 1.1 Progress of the research and chapter outline

The parallel examination of named parameters and its enrichment with non-Western classical perspectives is a new undertaking in the research of ‘aural-training’ pedagogy – one t...