Ear Skills

After reading “Creating Musical Flexibility Through the Ensemble” written by Brandt Schneider, it made me reflect about how I feel about ear training and sight-singing. My extensive work with ear training didn’t start until I was a freshman as an undergraduate and I tell you, I made much improvement the second time I took sight singing and ear training as a sophomore in college. I just didn’t learn anything from my professor my first year. I don’t remember as a younger student what my teachers had done for aural skills, but I do notice today that elementary music teachers are singing to their students a little greeting and the students sing back a response, hopefully, in the same pitch. Teachers use this as a sort of assessment, but it also tells the teacher A LOT about their students’ ears.

Schneider put a great emphasis on how he taught his students to be flexible. He taught them how to play simple songs in different keys. I’m sure he didn’t teach his kids how to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” in the hardest key ever first, but I do believe that he taught his students simple keys. Eventually he would have worked his way up there! I would imagine that he taught a scale at a time. That’s something else Schneider let me do as I read his article, imagine! He left very open instructions about how he accomplished flexibility that it left me wondering how he got there! There are many ways to get there then. 

So then how do we determine if someone’s a good musician or not? It’s such a vague question with different ideas that it simply cannot be answered with just one example of what makes a musician good. To be a good musician, you should have an understanding of your instrument (voice too!). Being a musician, one should have good technical skills as well as aural skills that can help when it comes time to look at a new piece of music. This musician is able to pick apart everything that makes up the music and is able to turn it into something more than just notes on a page.