If you have ever heard somebody saying that listening to Mozart is good for babies, this is the reason why - listening to and engaging with music supports the development of sophisticated neural trails that help the brain process information, this is the reason why so many children who have access to music education from an early age perform well in many subjects and overall perform better in verbal and non verbal reasoning. Learning music by ear improves your spatial awareness Where some of our teachers or heroes might associate learning music by ear with more “outdated” and “less nuanced” traditions or genres, it is clear from looking at the abilities of our jazz counterparts that learning to play by ear does not mean that the music produced is any less intellectually charged, in fact many would argue that jazz players have a much more extensive and well functioning harmonic and melodic understanding of the music they play as opposed to classical performers.Įven if we drain away the intellectual reasoning behind learning by ear of any genre, being able to pick up something just from hearing it is cool, funny and liberating, so here are the reasons that improving my ability to learn music by ear is on my list of goals for 2023. Nevertheless, being able to play by ear is a skill that many classical musicians (often secretly) covet. There are many reasons for this, a collection of requisites that have built a tradition in which musicians are often left feeling that they do not ‘understand’ or ‘speak’ their own language when asked to improvise or to recreate from an excerpt the music on their instrument the intellectualisation of the art form, the importance attributed to the ‘artefacts’ of the genre, the fact that classical music is often complicated and difficult to teach by ear in the early stages, the aid of a visual stimulus in a genre that values the memorisation of long pieces of music, the creative freedom that reading gives the performer in making their own intuitive musical decisions and not least the mostly harmless pass down of a tradition of reading and respecting the score from teacher to future teacher to future teacher etc. In my experience the general attitude towards ear training in the classical world is that it is rarely taught and is mostly a series of drills with no real attention given to students who do not yet have some form of reliable perfect or relative pitch, and with no real strategy offered for how to improve should you not be naturally gifted in the subject. In fact so much value is placed in being able to read music that classical music programmes at universities the world over feature classes of sight reading, study of the history of western classical notation, while, most include only the bare minimum requirement of ear training with maybe one or two hours a week reserved for dictating excerpts. If you are a classical musician having undergone a classical music education you will most likely be well acquainted with one style of learning, visual.
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