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Aural Teaching in the First Year of Tertiary Education: An Outline for a Course

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

George Pratt  and
Michael Henson
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Extract

The unit for Research into Applied Musical Perception (RAMP) was set up in the Music Department of Huddersfield Polytechnic in October 1985. Led by Professor George Pratt, then newly appointed as Head of Department, it was supported generously by the Polytechnic which made available a full-time Research Assistant post, filled by Michael Henson. Dr John Sloboda of Keele University, musical psychologist and author of ‘The Musical Mind’, agreed to be an Associate of the Unit and to co-supervise the first postgraduate students registered for research degrees.

The Unit spent a year enquiring of other institutions about their attitudes to teaching musical perception, and trying out a first-year course which this article describes.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Music Education , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , July 1987 , pp. 115 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1 Further references, in this article, to ‘do-it-yourself’ assignments use the shorthand ‘D-I-Y’ since this is the terminology familiar to and used by the students undertaking these assignments.

2 This is not to imply that dictation has no place in musical education. For some composers, particularly those who prefer to write away from an instrument, there is no more taxing or relevant exercise than absorbing and remembering sound and converting it accurately into notational symbols. The needs of arrangers and copyists are also well served by such skills. Our concern has been simply that dictation has traditionally occupied too prominent a place in aural syllabuses, and students are convinced that if they cannot do it, they are ‘bad at aural’. Furthermore, conventional dictation needs a lot of learning, but very little teaching. Huddersfield students, like most others, have access to a huge stock of recordings and scores, and are directed to practise dictation, if their specialisms generate a need for it, with headphones on in the record library. The slow movement of a Haydn quartet, say, provides material for melodic dictation, of two bars, or four bars – or whatever number of bars the listener's memory can cope with. Fed to the ears in this way, rather than by a teacher at the piano, it can be played in short or long sections, once or a dozen times, as needed to achieve the encouragement of success, and can then be checked by the listener against the library copy of the score.

3 J. Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, USA, 1961).

4 The whole issue of rhythm is examined more fully in Berry, Wallace; Structural Function in Music (New Jersey, 1976).Google Scholar

5 Steve Reich's rhythmic minimalism is a rich source of further ideas. His Music for Pieces of Wood is another performable piece, though very hard at the metronome marking he asks for. His Writings about Music (Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1974)Google Scholar contains an essay on African drumming with three notated examples which can be adapted for group use.

6 The performers are (i) George Pieterson (1980) and (ii) Gervase de Peyer (1969).

7 Recordings of Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied 'Cello range from Pablo Casals in the 1930s, transferred to LP (EMI), Lynn Harrell (Decca, LP and CD) and one performance on a baroque 'cello, by Anner Bijlsma (RCA).