Essential Music Lesson Ingredient No.2

VMT 073 - ESSENTIAL MUSIC LESSON INGREDIENT NO.2 Vibrant, vibrant, vibrant music teaching. Proven and practical tips, strategies and ideas for Music Teachers. This is Episode 73 of the Vibrant Music Teaching Podcast. I’m Nicola Cantan and this is the second episode in a series about the essential ingredients of well-balanced music lessons. Welcome back, beautiful teachers. And if you're joining me for the first time, first of all, a huge welcome to you. Second of all, I recommend you actually go back and check out last week's episode first. So whether you’ve been listening for a while or you’re brand new, go back to last week’s episode; that was Episode 72 and listen to that before this one because this series is really is designed to be a series. It’s about the essential music lesson ingredients. And in that episode; that’s Episode Number 72, so go to vibrantmusicteaching.com/72; in that episode, I explained why I'm doing this series and what it’s all about as well as talking about the first music lesson ingredient. So do go back and listen if you haven't already. If you're ready to carry-on forward though, we're talking today about the next vital music lesson ingredient. Last week was music reading and this week is all about ear training. This is one that’s slightly, not less obvious, because we all; most of us know we need to do some form of aural work or ear training. But it's definitely less ubiquitous than music reading. Most piano lessons, most instrumental music lessons include some form of music reading. But even with the best intentions, many music lessons do not include any ear training at all. I know my experience with ear training as a student and as a young teacher was simply directly before a piano exam. We would run through all of the aural test from the exam. This depends on the exam board, but in our case, it's just basically sight-singing and rhythm clapping and all of this stuff; it’s all mashed together into one aural test section or a theory section or whatever you want to call it. And it includes listening to a piece and saying answer some questions about it; that’s the main aural component. So, directly before the exam, we would go through these exercises. If I did well, great; I was ready. If I did poorly, well, there was nothing we could do about it because the exam was happening the next day or the next week. So just some quick tips, “Oh, just give it your best shot,” and off I would go. And this is pretty common. It's not that my teachers were so terribly negligent; it's pretty common because there’s so much else to teach, most lessons are only half an hour and as with all the stuff we’re talking about in this series, it's hard to balance it all. It's very hard to fit in ear training alongside everything else that you're doing. And so, it can be tempting to put it aside, to shelf it; until it comes to crunch time and you need it. Or maybe you never have that crunch time ‘cause your students don't do exams or anything where they have aural test and so, they don't get anything. It's all too common. But aural training is not aural tests; that's not the same thing. Ear training isn’t about just little drills to do with intervals or solfa or anything else. It's about actually developing students’ ears as opposed before. So why does this stuff matter? Why is this something that I consider an essential ingredient of great music lesson? Why do we need to fit it in? Well, to state the obvious, music is aural. That sounds ridiculous to say, right? You listen to this, going, “Yes, Nicola. I know that music makes sounds.” But I think we forget it. I think we lose sight of it. I certainly have, many times. We get so bogged down in the reading, in the notation, in the technique even; in everything else that we forget that we’re creating sound. That was the purpose of all of this stuff. So if our students aren’t paying attention to what they're hearing, if they don't have the skills to properly analyse things aurally, if they're not actively listening ever, then what are we even at? What are we doing, right? Doesn't make any sense. So we need to come back to the fact that music is actually something we listen to and we need to find ways to make our students more actively listen to their own playing and to the playing of others, whether that's recordings or in person at concerts; whatever they're doing. They need to have the skills and the habit of actively listening to what they’re hearing, not putting it on the background; we all have the music we listen to in the background. I’m talking about real listening where you actually pay attention, right? We need to be able to develop those skills in our students so that they can develop their own playing because how are they going to fix technique issues or notation errors or reading errors, I mean; or anything, if they don't listen to what they’re playing. So we need to develop this active listening; that’s part of what ear training is. It also can mean that they have the confidence they need to work something out by ear. That doesn’t have to mean that they’re a superstar, play-by-ear-style musicians. That's fine. If you want to develop that, great. But that's a particular specialization, let's say. Just being able to pick out something, something small and figure out what it is and how it goes, that's not a specialization; it shouldn't be. It should be something that students know they can do if they try and have a little bit of development in so that they're not completely lost when looking for note, when trying to figure something out by ear. Good ear training should also help students to understand music on a whole other level. So we talked about this last week when it comes to music reading, how notation can help us to understand music theory. Notation is not music theory; they’re not one and the same. But it can help us; greatly help us in understanding music. Ear training can do that, too. The first time I took the Kodaly summer; what do they call it? Summer Camp; no, it’s not called that. Summer Pedagogy Course. Anyway, they call it active music-making. It’s a week-long course that the Kodaly Institute of Ireland runs. And I took it a few years ago and I took it again this year because it's fantastic. But when I first took it a few years ago, I mean, it was one of the most exhausting weeks I have ever spent, constantly singing, and it really, it really opened my ears as it were. It really changed how I thought about so much to do with music because I had never experienced ear training like that. I'd experienced, like I say, these aural tests and tons of theory and all of this; obviously using my ears to actively listen. I’d gotten to that stage but I hadn’t experienced ear training on this level and in this way. Until when I took that course, it was, as I say, exhausting. I came home every day completely zonked and just collapse on the couch and stared into space for several hours because it was a lot. But because of that course, I really, gradually changed how I thought about ear training in lessons. And the results of that week ended up being digested in some way and convert it into ideas I was using my teaching for the next year at least; gradually, bit by bit, dripping back out all the stuff that had been stuffed into my brain. So when I talk about understanding music on another level, I'm talking about my students not experiencing that as a sudden onslaught of information but actually of being dripped out to them so that they don't get to the stage where their ears are so far behind their knowledge and understanding in other ways that it takes this enormous push to get their ears up to the same level or their aural awareness up to the same level as the rest of their music education. So dripping out this information to students, creating a curriculum that incorporates ear training all along the way so that they can actually understand music on that level as well as on a theoretical level and through notation. Right. So that’s why I think it's important to teach ear training and why this is my second essential music lesson ingredient of the six we’re going to be talking about. But how do we teach it? Well, you may have gathered this already, but for me, a big part of teaching ear training is using some Kodaly-inspired, let's say, methods. I incorporate solfa into all of my teaching and do lots of singing with my students.

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