Improve Your Aural!

This series of book/CD packages, written by Paul Harris, is one of my favourite teaching aids.

‘Aural skills’ in the context of singing or playing an instrument is about accurately hearing musical elements in order to understand how the music is constructed and being able to accurately reproduce rhythm and pitch. 

Sounds a bit technical and boring? 

Well that’s how it’s often taught and it's usually neglected until the last week or so before exam time, where it’s tested in a dry manner.  This is madness! Well developed aural skills are an essential part of musicianship and can be really enjoyable to develop.  Exploring music should be a pleasure.

Harris has produced 7 workbooks, each with an accompanying CD included, to go with each grade from 1 through to 8. (Grades 7 & 8 share one book).  The books are presented in a fun but not childish way, making them attractive to students of all ages.  He organises the skills into 5 sections: pulse and rhythm, pitch, singing from notation, listening to music and making connections.  The book and CD guide you through clearly explained exercises, with each one building on the last.  By working through the book methodically, repeating exercises until you feel confident with them, you find yourself at the end of the book realising you’re ready to take the aural section of the related grade exam.  Cleverly, Harris includes exam style exercises along the way but without labelling them as such so when you stand next to the pianist, the week before the exam to practice aural skills it’s no sweat – you’ve done it all before.  

I use these books in a few different ways.  With a new student I use it as an assessment tool, picking out a few exercises to help me work out their current level of competency.  Sometimes I pick out exercises to do in a lesson to help with a specific issue or because the student has worked particularly hard and needs a change of activity or ‘lightening up’.  Most often I ask the student to work through the book at home as part of their practice, checking up on progress each week and helping them with any queries or difficulties that have come to light.  Because the exercises are so easy to follow, students often race ahead on their own.  However, younger students, particularly those without musical parents to assist, tend to manage better if you work through the exercises in class.  For very young students who are desperate for instrument lessons but would suffer from severe brain ache if they spent half an hour trying to cover recorder holes properly, the change of activity provides a welcome break yet continues to educate.       

Harris has included a wide range of musical styles which keeps things interesting, as do the different types of exercises he uses: singing, clapping, playing your instrument, listening, improvising and writing music down.   The final section, Making Connections is great because it puts the skills into context and helps the student understand the point of their efforts.

I have a couple of minor criticisms of the series.  Firstly, the musical styles used range from baroque to swing but does not include pop (the most relevant style of music to many students).  However, lots of the exercises are easily transferable to pieces of music of your choosing (either recorded or played by the teacher on their own instrument) and I sometimes ask a student to bring in a favourite CD for us to work with (thank you Amy Winehouse for putting so many different rhythms and interesting melodies on a best selling pop CD).  Secondly, all the instruments on the CD, except the piano, are synthesized, presumably because this keeps the cost down to a refreshingly affordable £4.50 per book (£10.50 for the Grade 7-8 book).  This means it’s not great for introducing students to the sound qualities of different instruments (important at GCSE level) and I struggled on a question that asks you pick out different instruments – the instrument in question was the trumpet, which I used to play myself, but it just didn’t sound quite right on the CD.  However, Harris has used such a range of instrument sounds that, apart from that one exercise, the synthesizer thing will probably only annoy purists who can aford orchestral recordings or former geeky sound technology students such as myself.  Use his questions with your own recordings if it bothers you. Otherwise, prepare to really enjoy Improving Your Aural!