When I studied at Juillliard, there were two main music courses, aside from private lessons and ensembles, everyone was expected to participate in. They were: music theory and ear-training.
While the phrase ‘ear-training’ sounds amusing (I imagine someone trying to lift bar-bells with their ear, like going to the gym), it actually is a skill that carries with it powerful ability to function as a top-level musician in any musical activity or opportunity.
The study of Ear-training at Juilliard came predominantly from a school in Paris around the beginning of the 20th century by Nadia Boulenger.
Nadia Boulanger influenced generations of Americans with her teaching. She passed away in 1979, but she and her curriculum are highly respected in the American music world and at the European American Music Alliance in France.
Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, and Quincy Jones all studied with the legendary French pedagogue, Nadia Boulanger. We offer ear-training classes at our music school Odessa Texas.
Boulanger was active as a composer, conductor, and teacher. She came from a musical family, and her sister Lili is also highly recognized as a composer. Nadia Boulanger achieved early honors as a student at the Paris Conservatoire. She influenced generations of young composers, especially those from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.
The students lived in Paris for many of their formative years to study with Boulanger, and many became leading composers, soloists, arrangers, and conductors, including Copland, Glass, Jones, and Elliott Carter. She primarily taught at the American School at Fontainebleau outside Paris, and her teaching style was based on objective skills rather than subjective leanings, emphasizing technique of counterpoint, ear training, and harmony. Boulanger was also the first woman to conduct major orchestras in America and Europe, including conducting world premieres of works by Copland and Igor Stravinsky.
While at Juilliard, I had the distinct honor of studying with Mary Anthony Cox, a legendary instructor who studied with Boulanger at Fontainebleau from the age of 15. Ms. Cox brought Boulanger’s instruction back to the U.S., and for nearly 50 years influenced a great lineage of musical artists coming through the school.
While the development of Aural skills, from a classical tradition, is important, it is also important to translate those skills to a contemporary understanding that is useful in our culture. This can be done by extending it to harmonic spectrum analysis of any musical style. This entails understanding which frequencies comprise a ‘mix.’ In the recording studio, engineers tweak recorded materials using high-pass filters, low-pass filters, EQ, and a range of other effects to alter specific frequencies in specific ranges. This is not much different than looking at a piano keyboard, from low notes to high notes, to decide which to maximize and which to minimize.
When a student begins to become aware of frequencies across the musical spectrum, a vocabulary opens up that allows the student to begin to utilize these musical tools to his own advantage. We expect our students to become aware of frequencies at our music school Odessa Texas.
Learning how to listen is much different than simply hearing. Hearing is passive. Listening is active. We hear things around us all day long, but listening takes focus. A certain concentration is needed to be able to listen attentively.
Being able to listen to a song on the radio and know what key it is in, know what are the basic chord patterns (I, IV, V, etc.), know the arranging (hearing when the bass comes in, when the acoustic guitar enters, when a string section begins), all simply by listening to it, is how ear-training becomes relevant to the modern musician.
Sitting and listening to a Beethoven String Quartet and following the harmonic structure in your mind, listening to a Bach Well-Tempered Clavier fugue and being aware of each fugal subject iteration – these are high levels of aural awareness that can be developed in a student. As students at our music school Odessa Texas learn to actively listen, they become much more highly effective as musicians.
Another benefit to Ear-training is in the subject of Transcription. Bach, throughout his life would transcribe other people’s compositions, in order to learn from them. Having a successfully trained ear, gives the student the ability to go to YouTube to find a song for which there is no sheet music, and transcribe it simply by hearing it. Many musicians do this by applying what they see another artist doing to their own instrument, copying the fingering. This may work for a single player on a single instrument, but transcription entails gathering information on every instrument, and capturing it into notation. In this manner, an entire group of musicians can play from a score that has been recreated from the original recording.
Our regional orchestra once called me up because they were in a bind, lacking a jazz arrangement for an upcoming concert. They couldn’t find the sheet music they needed, and the concert was that weekend. I found the jazz band arrangement on YouTube and transcribed it. Then, I orchestrated the transcribed parts for full symphony orchestra for them. This could not have been possible without successfully implementing Ear-training skills.
One of the great benefits of Transcribing other people’s material, is that it gives you the ability to transcribe what is in your own imagination. This is the process of Composition (i.e. creating your own music). When you become skillful at writing what you physically hear from other people’s recorded material, you also become capable of writing down what you hear in your own imagination. We expect each student in our music school Odessa Texas to grow into full autonomy as artists.
Many people experience this process, through their own instrument. They imagine what they want to play, then play on their instrument what they are internally imagining. This is called Improvisation. The process of transcription and composition is doing this very thing. Except, it is done by writing down in notation what each player would play in score format. We also instruct students in learning how to improvise fluidly at our music school Odessa Texas.
Improvisation was practiced by Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Even modern 20th century composers like Olivier Messiaen have been captured on video improvising. Bach became so skilled at improvisation, that improvisation and composition became the same process for him. He composed so quickly that it was like performing, and he improvised with such depth of thought that he was creating highly complex fugues out of his imagination, in real time.
The subject of transcription/composition (or putting into visual scoring) and the subject of improvisation (playing ‘by ear’) are really two sides of the same coin. Visual and Aural go together to create a complete contemporary musician.
“The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made both of them.” (Prov. 20:12)
It is our greatest joy in our music school Odessa Texas to help students gain mastery of both music-reading and improvisation.