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The Art of Listening for All Music Students

Musicians should learn how to listen - here are some practical tips on learning to listen to music.

Of course not.

Most people would agree that a necessary first step before being able to draw a horse would be to first see what a horse looks like. Ask any Disney artist and they will tell you about the depth of study required to fully animate a horse and how each movement must be fully understood before the artist is able to recreate the horses movement in a series of drawings. The same is true of music. The music the student wishes to play must be fully understood before a meaningful performance can be achieved. Similar to the Disney artist that needs lots of experience with his subject matter before being able to effectively recreate it, the musician needs extensive experience of actively listening to music before being able to effectively recreate it at the piano.

But, amazingly, all too often students expect to be able to learn how to play the piano without ever listening to any piano music and often without listening to any other music at all.

Students should be encouraged to establish a regular routine of listening to music which is both familiar and new to them. Listening to a wide variety of musical styles helps the student to subconsciously absorb the different musical elements involved in being able to recreate that particular style. Repetition in the students listening activities plays just as important a role as repetition during practice.

Listening is essential to building your own internal "sound picture" of music. Hearing music is not enough. There is a difference between listening and hearing. Listening involves giving the music your full and undivided attention. Imagine yourself in the kitchen preparing dinner and the news is on the TV in the family room. You can hear the news clearly but your attention is elsewhere and you are not listening to it. If you are not paying attention to what you are hearing you will not benefit from the experience. You will not know what the news was about and you would be unable to communicate the message of the news to someone else. Similarly if you are not paying attention to the music you hear you will not benefit from the experience. Listening skills are more difficult to master than you may image when learning an instrument.

It is commonly known that music is a language in itself but what is not so commonly understood is the process that contributes to learning this language. In order to understand the news on TV you must first spend many years learning the language the news is spoken in. Similarly in order to fully understand the music you are listening to, in enough detail that you could communicate it to someone else, through performance, then you must first learn the language of music.

A good course of lessons will also teach students the essential listening skills required to fully master music as a language, as part of the regular work completed on learning new pieces, and will also include regular time spent on exercises designed specifically to develop the musical ear. A course of carefully graded ear training and aural activities which increase in complexity as the student becomes more advanced is therefore necessary. The development of these skills is essential to becoming a rounded musician and forms and important part of developing a solid musical foundation on which higher levels of performance may be achieved.

The ABRSM is the world's leading authority on musical assessment and publish a carefully graded course of aural and ear training activities ranging from elementary studies for the beginner student up to advanced levels of training suitable for students preparing for music college auditions. These activities are useful for any music student to follow even if they do not intend to take any musical examinations. Paul Hankin is an experienced ABRSM teacher and offers to include this curriculum as part of regular lessons. The combination of the ABRSM curriculum and carefully coordinated computer based ear training activities provides a powerful and effective approach to developing these essential listening skills.

An excellent place to start your listening experience would be to purchase the recordings for the ABRSM piano examination pieces which may be downloaded immediately after purchase from the ABRSM website. I would recommend purchasing all the piano recordings available for every grade level. There are over 160 recordings in all. The advantage of listening to these recordings is that the recordings are graded by level. Grade 1 being the beginner level recordings and grade 8 being the more advanced piano recordings. I believe it is useful and necessary for students to have access to a wide variety of pieces recorded at different musical standards in order to help them build their own internal sound picture and develop an awareness of how music progresses on to higher levels of technical difficulty before actually playing this music themselves. Listening to good recordings of piano pieces at different levels will help the student develop an appreciation for how pieces at different grades sound and will allow them to focus their ear more easily on the "musical elements" within the music than if they only had the opportunity to listen to more complex music which is inherently more difficult to subconsciously understand. When learning a language we start by listening to and repeating simple words and sentences which grow in complexity as we get older. A similar approach is advisable when learning the language of music through listening.

Much of this understanding is achieved at a subconscious level and an important part of engaging in this type of listening activity is to feed the subconscious mind with musical shapes, ideas, and phrases which may then resurface at a later point in the learning process manifesting itself, to the rest of the world, as a student who "just seems to get it". This in turn has the knock on effect of helping to enable students more easily learn new musical material and appear to have "more talent" than the student who has not had the benefit of this listening experience. In order to master this skill students needs to fully immerse themselves in the process. A regular routine of listening to different music, including piano music, helps to provide the student with the kind of immersive experience required to excel in their piano studies.

On a personal footnote I was very fortunate, as a young student, to have the opportunity to study with an teacher who was a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England for 10 years before moving on to study at Music College. My piano teacher always considered this type of ear training central to the work we did. This lead to an early development of "perfect pitch" or "absolute pitch" that I recall having from the age of 11 years old. When I moved on to Music College at the age of 18 years old the course I studied included 3 years of advanced aural and ear training classes scheduled for one hour every week. After a few weeks of lessons I was advised by the college that I no longer needed to attend these classes as my aural, listening and transcribing skills were already more advanced than that required of any student graduating at the end of the 3 year course.