The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy

Before, In, and Beyond Higher Education

Kent Cleland, Paul Fleet, Kent Cleland, Paul Fleet, Kent D. Cleland, Kent D. Cleland, Paul Fleet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000357493
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Education General

The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy offers a comprehensive survey of issues, practice, and current developments in the teaching of aural skills. The volume regards aural training as a lifelong skill that is engaged with before, during, and after university or conservatoire studies in music, central to the holistic training of the contemporary musician. With an international array of contributors, the volume captures diverse perspectives on aural-skills pedagogy, and enables conversation between different regions. It addresses key new developments such as the use of technology for aural training and the use of popular music. This book will be an essential resource and reference for all university and conservatoire instructors in aural skills, as well as students preparing for teaching careers in music.

INTERMEZZO 1
Terrain

The word ‘terrain’ refers literally to the defining characteristics of a stretch of land. Metaphorically, it refers to the defining characteristics of something being described. In the case of aural skills, it can have multiple meanings: (1) the mechanical characteristics of curricula and practice; or (2) the psychological space of how aural skills are conceived in the mechanical arena.

The opening section of this book is devoted to looking at the terrain of aural skills pedagogy from both perspectives. Paul Fleet begins with a meta-examination of the typical place of aural-skills instruction in curricula throughout the English-speaking world. He examines when aural-skills instruction typically starts and how long it typically continues in various types of institutions as well as how often aural-skills instruction is combined or integrated with other theoretical and musical instruction. These elements will inform, as will the following chapters, the coda to this book, where a design for the future of aural training will be proposed.

Simon Parkin follows with an examination of the psychological space of aural skills in the curriculum, providing an engaging look at how current practices have evolved over a career that has spanned several decades. Ultimately, his chapter is a story of a search for relevance, and a description of how his institution, and many others, have similarly sought to increase the relevance of aural skills instruction and what concrete steps these institutions took (and are taking) to pursue this goal.

In many ways, the remainder of this book continues an examination of these foundational themes, as relevance is an ideal that most of the authors in this collection seek. They have been successfully finding creative and innovative ways to do so within the mechanical constraints of the higher education curriculum and the amount of ‘space’ that it allots to aural skills instruction.

1
THE TERRAIN OF EAR TRAINING ACROSS THE GLOBE

Paul Fleet

Introduction

The title of this chapter is a remarkably lofty one, and one that I acknowledge suggests more than it can deliver. However, such a bold statement is needed – and particularly within this volume. At the close of the Royal Academy of Music Aural Skills Pedagogy Symposium (2017) the vested parties sat in a circle and shared ideas of what to do next after hearing, discussing, and questioning the informative papers that had been presented (to note, one of those ideas was this volume). Those speaking in this circle-of-trust included educators from North America, Canada, Europe, Australia, and the United Kingdom from middle-school, high school, college, university, and conservatoire institutions. We found much in common from our respective global and educational areas, and while one would expect such collegiality from a group of invested people who had all made the effort to gather together to discuss the value of ear training, what surprised us most of all was the level of detail in our commonalities.

We agreed that ear training was an essential part of musicianship – of course, we would, wouldn’t we? But we also agreed that it was not equally represented either in music education or when compared to other essential skills of musicianship. To quote Christopher Small – which no self-respecting book on the understanding of music can nor should avoid: ‘[I]t is possible to do too much study of scores and not enough listening; a symphony is, after all, primarily an aural experience.’ (1998, 171). An anecdote was told during this final session of the symposium of the student who is practicing for their performance grade. Two weeks before the exam, the educator reminds the student that ear training will be part of the test and suggests that they should run through some examples together. On hearing this story, we shook our heads in communal frustration at its familiarity, and agreed that two weeks is not enough time to build in the ability nor the competency for many students to do more than just pass the test and instead be able to demonstrate the skill. In this moment, we were not pointing fingers at any particular exam body (as all learning bodies that we have been involved with as educators recognize the value of ear training); neither were we pointing any fingers at instrumental tutors (as many of us owe our passion for music education from these educators). What we were doing is reminding ourselves that the value of ear training can be regarded as something adjunct to the learning experience, and shouldn’t we as those vested in ear-training pedagogy critically challenge this and provide some solutions?

We agreed that not only was ear training not given enough space in educational curricula, but it was also not recognized proportionally in the academic journey toward professional musicianship. No one present in that room in London, nor would we suggest anyone involved in music education, believes that aural skills are something that can be learned in a semester or even on completion of a program of study. Ear training is a lifelong skill. Just as the acquisition and use of language is a lifelong skill, so is the ability to listen to sounds being produced and recognize and understand them. First as sounds; then as forming some type of hegemonic or self-organizing collections of tones; to becoming identifiable as individual elements within a recognizable structure; moving toward the ability to retain and then recollect elements that share properties and codes across and between musical experiences; to the point of correct identification of elements; before reaching the skill of reproduction of those elements inside or outside of a musical context and either sung or notated. While this is an unashamedly structuralist reading of the process of ear training, the relationship between the musical signifier and the signified (Agawu, 1991; Nattiez, 1990; Tagg, 2012) is a useful way of thinking about the lifelong journey of developing aural skills. We might even relate this to the stages of pedagogical standard in Bloom’s taxonomy (Biggs & Tang, 2011, 124), where the musician undertaking ear training encounters learning objectives that enable her or him to move from remembering sounds, to understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, to finally critically creating them.

Perhaps this is where the problem lies: how do we co-create a curriculum that speaks to the lifelong journey of a skill that is taught at various stages of education, across varying institutions across the globe, and undertaken by students with varying abilities upon joining each stage of the designed learning journey at that particular institution? This does seem like an impossible task, and are the disconnections in the mapping of the educational journey to the institution to the individual musician something that we cannot ever address?¹ But none of us in that room felt that way. We all believed that co-creation and sharing of ideas could tackle some of these issues and prevent the time-worn position of blaming the prior institution for not preparing the student to the appropriate standard required by the current institution. Such an excuse is not good enough, nor even correct to voice. I am minded to compare it, for dramatic effect if nothing else, to the plumber who looks at your central heating system before saying “tut-tut” and asking who was the person that installed such a badly functioning device. It is a dislocation of blame and does not address what, in a solution-finding approach, could be done to better the situation for the benefit of the student.

So how do we test these two positions – that ear training does not get the space it requires in a curriculum, and it is unhelpfully compartmentalized by educational qualification levels that do not match the differing entry points of the students – and discover whether what we unpacked during that conference is more than a collective consciousness during a moment in time and instead nearer the truth about the field of ear training? If we can do that, then we would have a surer footing on which to address and offer solutions to these concerns.

One way of investigating is to adopt a particular mode of enquiry: the scientific model. This is something that many of us grew up with at school and is almost as old the practice of research itself. While there are many versions on what constitutes a ‘scientific method,’ we would hope that the majority of our readership would recognize and feel comfortable with the following pattern as it progresses through the various subheadings in this chapter. But before we begin, I might need to defend the position of adopting an overly scientific method in a humanities discipline. I would counter this potential claim by suggesting that what we are trying to uncover does need some assistance from a more quantitative field, given that we are testing a hypothesis. Further, the field of scientific methodology is not as rigid to qualitative inquiry as the unhelpful binarism between science and humanities may be understood, even within a populist readings of the terms. One of my favorite recruitment campaigns by a university expressed the need for a balanced academic inquiry. The University of Utah in 2012 produced a poster: ‘Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.’² Such humor aside, it is worth reminding ourselves that ‘despite its rigid structure, the scientific method still depends on the most human capabilities: creativity, imagination, and intelligence; and without these, it cannot exist.’ Castillo (2013, 1669). With this now all said, let us begin with the first part of the inquiry into the terrain of ear training across the globe.

Define Purpose

As was discussed in that symposium of 2017 during and between the sessions, aural/ear training is often considered to be the ‘poor cousin’ of music theory. To be clear we are not talking about the objectivist problem of ear training that Covington and Lord (1994) discuss, where a distinct set of facts and skills are tested in the classroom (e.g., identify the interval of a major seventh) without reference to the ‘real music’ of the professional musician [see in this book the chapters by Atkinson, Parkin, and Francis, who address this very issue]. Instead, we are talking about its place in the curricula of music education. The purpose of this investigation is to test whether there are commonalities in the delivery of ear-training curricula across the levels of education at a global level. These terms will of course need to be further defined, but for the moment the purpose is to understand if those connections shared at the symposium can be regarded as being representative of ear training in education in general, and if so, how we might understand those shared elements for the benefit of its Theory and Curriculum: Methodologies for the Learning Space, Teaching: Activities within the Learning Space, Transferring: Applications outside the Learning Space, Techniques both tonal and post-tonal, and in its Technology, all of which are the chapter sections that are integral parts of this companion.

Construct Hypothesis

Any testing of a hypothesis, let alone the two we are about to formalize, is remarkably problematic when considering a global landscape and the various stages of an educational journey. But we do need to try, so let us put these elements on separate axes. What should we understand by global in terms of ear training for the first axis? While it would be interesting, it would be beyond the realm of useful through variance to consider each country on the planet. So instead, if we move up a stage to continent, and then cross-reference with locations that were not only represented by their citizens at the symposium but also those that are commonly understood as having long-standing related educational systems from middle school to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), then we find ourselves with the following list: United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, Western and Central Europe, and Australia.

With this regional axis now defined, we can consider what should be understood by levels of education for its complementary axis. There is a remarkable difference in educational systems and structures within each of the global locations. For example, given its size, in the United States of America each state has its own educational framework; and each of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom have different educational curricula depending upon t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Overture
• Intermezzo 1 Terrain
• Intermezzo 2 Theory and Curriculum: Methodologies for the Learning Space
• Intermezzo 3 Teaching: Activities within the Learning Space
• Intermezzo 4 Transferring: Application outside of the Learning Space
• Intermezzo 5 Techniques
• Intermezzo 6 Technology
• The Future of Aural Training
• Index