If there is anything a graduate from a music school should know, it is a basic insight into how and why great composers and performers do what they do. Understanding this opens up doors to your own enjoyment of music as well as your comprehension of something that is mystifying to everyone else. It really doesn’t matter what your particular field of music will ultimately be, music theory and aural skills gives you insight into how all the notes and rhythms are put together in a composition. So with that in mind, here are my Top 10 Reasons to Study Music Theory and Aural Skills: I made similar mistakes as an undergraduate and will do anything I can as an educator to break that trend. This happens because 18- and 19-year-old students cannot know what any one piece of their education will mean to them five or ten years in the future. I’ve seen in many of my own students a selective approach to learning that often leads to failure. In other words, we best serve ourselves as learners and musicians when we learn as much as possible without an a priori agenda. But I come from a background that emphasizes the liberal arts, which to me means that learning ought not to be a means to an end, but an end unto itself. This is no easy task, as USC offers majors in music industry, popular music, composition, as well as the usual (and some unusual) performance-oriented majors. He and I (mostly he) are reworking the freshman and sophomore theory curriculum at USC so that it can serve the diverse educational goals that exist at this school. In most cases, singers can improve their pitch accuracy by simply improving their aural skills.About a month ago, my professor and mentor, Brian Head, asked me to come up with the 10 most important reasons for an undergraduate music student to study music theory and aural skills. ![]() Singing is also commonly used to improve aural skills, as there is a direct connection between a good musical ear and accurate singing. ![]() In many music schools, ear training includes the use of solfege syllables (movable-Do system), with which you are putting your recognition skills into a tonal context. The main focus of ear training being the development of aural skills, the training sessions mainly involve identifying sounds by ear and naming them, transcribing them, playing them back, singing them or, at more advanced levels, improvising upon them according to harmonic rules. This is why ear training is a mandatory course in most music schools and conservatoires aroudn the world. This is called improving one's relative pitch. In other words, our aural skills are a bridge between the terms we use to explain music (an octave, a perfect cadence, a harmonic minor scale, etc.), and the actual sounds that are described by those terms. The more we train our ear to recognize this connection, the better musicians we become, because we learn to understand what we play, to anticipate musical structures, and to communicate with other musicians using the language of music.īoth beginners and professionals need to keep their ear in shape in order to know what they (and others, for that matter) are playing, and to anticipate what they are about to play. ![]() What is ear training? Ear training makes you a better musicianĮar training is the process of connecting music theory (notes, intervals, chords, scales, melodies, etc.) with the sounds we hear.
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