Listening

Music lessons can often become a formality whereby useful skills of musicianship are lost on a conveyor belt of scales and endless grading pieces. While I would confess that I find these aspects of a musician's development to be invaluable, the skill I am most interested in teaching is listening.

From a young age, my peers and I endeavoured to become technically proficient at our instruments, pass exams, join ensembles and orchestras and 'keep up the pace', so-to-speak. I discovered modern classical music fairly late in my musical development and the experience was entirely new to me. I realised a great gap between my listening skills and my instrumental skills. I threw myself into a discovery of new music, training my ears to hear as much detail as possible and training my mind in new ways of discerning sound. I was able to develop very reliable relative-pitch, improve my understanding of rhythm, timbre, orchestration, enhance my knowledge of musicology amongst some incredible skills. Modern music and avant-garde sounds were the catalyst for me to investigate new sounds much the same way as I feel each musician should push his or her listening boundaries to train their ears.

Listening is the definitive musical experience and requires practice like any other skill. These are the essential skills that one requires when working with other musicians: the shared vision and vocabulary of each other's listening experience.