Importance of aural skill for composers

Recently I have notice a trend in many young composers with poor aural skills, who could not sing their own simple melodies written down. Many have also poor sense of recognizing chord progressions. I would like to ask composers here on what is their view.

Not necessary at all.

I mean even if you're writing good'ol tonal music, there's so much that at a composer can only really learn by writing and hearing what they wrote, that any of the typical ear-training crap makes no difference.

Then there's of course the deal with why bother learning how to "sing melodies" when your music doesn't use them that way. I mean I doubt anyone would berate Schoenberg because he couldn't sight-sing his 12 tone pieces.

On that note, I only learned how to sight-sing for an exam, after that I never, ever, used it again. Likewise with 99% of the "training" you have to endure in the typical ear-training courses. I have never, ever, thought "Oh thank god I did that course!" at any moment, ever. Instead I hated wasting time.

And of course the practice of melody dictation was maybe a great thing to have in 1700, but it's entirely pointless these days for a composer. I mean if you want to figure out something by ear, you're MOST likely going to be able to if you keep trying. Hell I used to play a lot of music by ear on guitar, and it didn't help at all in my exams. I still play a lot of stuff by ear and improvise/jam with people frequently, but THESE "ear" skills aren't appreciated by any of the ear-training courses I had to take. Quite irritating.

Learn you ear training. If you can't sight-sing a melody AND dictate melody (i.e. go from score to sound and from sound to score), then you're doing yourself a terrible disservice, not only compositionally, but as a musician in general.

Learn you ear training. If you can't sight-sing a melody AND dictate melody (i.e. go from score to sound and from sound to score), then you're doing yourself a terrible disservice, not only compositionally, but as a musician in general.

Some people think this. Some people just don't care since it doesn't matter in the end.

After all, would you like Mozart less if you learned he couldn't do melody dictation or sight-read melodies? The output from a composer is all that matters in the end, and it's not really relevant how they got to it.

I mean, there's people who couldn't even read or write music and were fantastic musicians. Narrow-mindedness with scraggy like this is PRECISELY the reason why it's so pointless as it overlooks that it MAY be useful, but it may also not be.

You don't have too, given that some composers can't even read music. :musicwhistle:

However, I think that you should be able to to it. I think that being able to sing it back is a great help, because you can then really tell what will work and what won't.

So, I'm not pressuring anyone, but it is a suggestion :P

If you can't sight sing an atonal melody in 31 tone equal temperament, you aren't a REAL composer.

I mean, there's people who couldn't even read or write music and were fantastic musicians. Narrow-mindedness with scraggy like this is PRECISELY the reason why it's so pointless as it overlooks that it MAY be useful, but it may also not be.

So why not learn it anyway? Its a useful skill regardless.

A good ear is definitely one of the greatest assets a musician can have. If you hear music in your head how else will you transfer it onto paper/instrument? Yes you can probably noodle around on your instrument and figure it out, but what if you don't have an instrument at hand? It's helpful for me at least because my best ideas usually hit me away from an instrument.

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I don't know. To me, if you don't hear it in your brain first, how on earth do you know it's gonna be good?

But then you write it and have a doodad render it for you and then you know. But then how do you know how to make it better/fix errors if you can't audiate what you WANT to hear?

But I guess some compositions are more about the process than the sound? :veryunsure:

Composing is a process. No matter how great it sounds to you in your head, reality is quite different. There's no "sure fire" way to know how something sounds like just with theory of any kind. You need to live enough performances, deal with musicians, etc etc to start to understand how reality works. By that point however it's entirely irrelevant how good you "hear" since you'll know already what to expect from what you're writing.

But this of course applies to music that isn't style copies or whatever. It's quite a feat to have a good idea of how a process score will work in practice, or in how many different ways something aleatory may change, or how people would improvise a section, etc etc. Even then it's all guesswork and you may be entirely wrong. Same with graphical scores or unclear notation, but at the same time you have to know how to step back and imagine the whole idea in your head.

And that can't be trained for in any goddamn ear training course, it's just good'ol experience.

Some people think this. Some people just don't care since it doesn't matter in the end.

After all, would you like Mozart less if you learned he couldn't do melody dictation or sight-read melodies? The output from a composer is all that matters in the end, and it's not really relevant how they got to it.

True enough.

But point of interest:

do we know of any great composer who had no ear? Who could not hear an idea in his head and reproduce it onto paper? Mozart certainly was not such a composer.

THAT'S what aural skill is: it's not just the ability to sing, it's an awareness of what you hear in relation to notation.

Without it, all you have at your disposal as a composer is "I think it would sound cool if I did this. ...well, what do you know, it does."

I mean it's fine, but don't we want as many tools at our disposal as possible? Particularly if we're writing tonally.

I mean but it's not necessarily a "weird music only" thing.

I think SSC's point about what's NOT taught in ear training is important.

There's also a far cry between even complex rhythm dictations and the kind of transcriptions you need for performance or whatever.

I dunno. If I kept up with it, got up past three-part harmonic dictations, transcribed more in general, maybe it'd be a part of what I do. As it is, i just translate everything to bass guitar anyway. If I can do it there, then likely a real musician can do it for strings, and there's some analogue that's just a google search away for air instruments.

Since when is ear training limited to tonal styles? The last few chapters of my ear training book are all about "modern" and "atonal" melodies. Pretty interesting stuff.

Eh. yeah that was two semesters of ear training right there - atonal one semester, aleatoric and graphic stuff another.

While the atonal stuff was good - especially harmonic dictations, it never got past two-part dictations. The aleatoric stuff was not taken seriously by the class, and the prof didn't help that any because she couldn't see why it all seemed ridiculous to us.

Basically though, the question is how damaging a piecemeal understanding of listening is. THat is, I know what a violin sounds like in its stratosphere, so I can morph the crappy finale playback into the right pitch and what I know it should sound like. Is that ear training? I don't know.

THat is, I know what a violin sounds like in its stratosphere, so I can morph the crappy finale playback into the right pitch and what I know it should sound like. Is that ear training? I don't know.

That's precisely what isn't taught.

In general I think that no matter how hard you train, having a practical ear for composing is not something you can learn from any book or course. The "standard" crap, even atonal dictation is nothing more than hearing intervals. IF it all boils down to just that then what's the point again? Even so, hard to find composers who didn't write with an instrument, which renders moot a lot of the "but they had great ears!" Oh really? But it obviously didn't stop them from using the instrument many, many times.

My teachers often told me that I had to write away from anything that produces sound, but not because I needed to develop some magical ear or something, but because I needed to listen to my own ideas and try to imagine how it would sound like, at least in concept. Maybe not the exact notes, but if you can read music chances are you know more or less in which direction something is going.

And then really, studying music with scores and reading along is also 100% more useful than any kind of dictation. Seeing first hand what something sounds like and seeing it written at the same time is where you really start developing that kind of "inner ear" thing, the one that actually matters. This isn't something taught in any of the courses I had to do, nor in any of the books I had to read, I don't know why.

Hmm... SSC, just a question or two.

Assuming you want to write "standard" tonal music, wouldn't knowing how certain chord progressions sound be helpful? If you want to attempt something outside of common I-V-I schemes the ability to hear in your head where the music is going harmonically seems quite important for me (unless you have access to a piano or something). I wonder if Beethoven etc. could even "hear" new chord progressions in their head? I haven't analysed any late Beethoven yet so I wonder if and how his harmonic language evolved during his last years of deafness. (Arpeggiating chords in my head only leaves a very weak impression of this in my mind but it might just be my lack of practice.)

I have also got the feeling that coming up with decent melodies should be easier if you're familiar with all intervals. By decent I mean melodies that don't consist of wholly diatonic stepwise movement because these are the easiest to come up with - a memorable melody like some of the ones Schubert came up with seem a lot more complicated than that (D 959, Scherzo anyone?), especially if it tonicises a different key or modulates . I don't count the famous Ode to Joy because however famous it is, the melody itself isn't very special, which is not to say the 9th Symphony isn't amazing overall.

Finally, a good short-term musical memory seems useful to me. I can usually improvise endlessly in my head or on an instrument and it sounds good, but writing it down seems more difficult to me - I've got the feeling my memory makes me forget the last few seconds so fast that I don't pay any particular attention to phrasing or that I just forget parts of the music because I'm not fast enough with my pen.

These are all things that can be trained, but alas, I haven't even started any studies as a composer yet and these are all abilities I'd see as important from an instrumentalist's point of view.

It's fascinating reading all the thoughts on this. Personally, while I think that it is important to develop aural skills as a musician, I don't necessarily think that they make you a better (or worse) composer than another. Some of my best ideas were ones where instead of hearing the melody, I saw the melody being written on staff paper in my dream. My ability to visually recall the melody in my dream aided me in writing the piece. I used my physical ears to determine how I wanted it to expand on it, etc.

Another interesting question, which I've often asked myself after hearing stories about Beethoven's deafnesss: could it be possible to teach a person who was born deaf (as opposed to Beethoven, who went deaf gradually) musical composition? Most people, I think, would say, no.

I say yes, because I believe that music is far more independent from its physical realizations (sounds produced by instruments or voices) than is often supposed. Basically, I believe that music is like mathematics (at least according to the "intuitionist" school): an entirely internal and personal edifice of the mind, with an entirely incorporeal inner structure, and which finds its genesis in the primordial intuition of the division of time into equal intervals (i.e. counting).

A fun analogy, it seems to me, is that of chess. Chess exists wholly independently of physical chessmen. Otherwise there could be no such thing as blind chess masters or, more to the point, computer chess. Lastly, I believe it's possible, in principle, that one day a computer program will compose music as lovely as that of Bach or Mozart. But we will have to wait... :)

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Music is the art of sound.

If you absolutely cannot hear and never could hear, there is no art, only random realizations.

Is that art?

Well...if you say so.

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Music is the art of sound.

If you absolutely cannot hear and never could hear, there is no art, only random realizations.

Is that art?

Well...if you say so.

I think it's exactly the other way round: if music were just the art of sound, then there would be little else but randomness. My tea kettle makes a really lovely and aesthetic sound, but that doesn't alter its being "chance noise". For me music is the art of beautiful temporal proportions, with instrumental and vocal sound as its more or less arbitrary and, arguably, interchangeable medium - simply because most people happen to be much more sensitive to temporal proportion if it's presented in an aural form.

Pythagoras, for example, defined musical intervals in terms of frequency ratios, or rather ratios of string lengths, composed of small integers (octave 1:2, perfect fifth 2:3, etc.). So if our hypothetical deaf composer could find a way of relating, for example, the temporal ratio 64 : 81 : 96 (the major triad in just intonation) to high aesthetic pleasure (for example by translating it into dance paces), then he/she could compose a progression of major triads, which would be completely equivalent to a hearing composer strumming it on his/her guitar. Of course this is just a simple example, which neglects note duration among other parameters, but I think such a thing could be done on a much more elaborate scale. I think there's no valid philosophical reason to essentially distinguish a non-aural "model" of music (in this case a particularly elaborate and rule-bound choreography) from "real" aural music.

Hmm... SSC, just a question or two.

Assuming you want to write "standard" tonal music, wouldn't knowing how certain chord progressions sound be helpful?

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Finally, a good short-term musical memory seems useful to me. I can usually improvise endlessly in my head or on an instrument and it sounds good, but writing it down seems more difficult to me - I've got the feeling my memory makes me forget the last few seconds so fast that I don't pay any particular attention to phrasing or that I just forget parts of the music because I'm not fast enough with my pen.

It's simple, just like it helps a writer to actually write, a composer is only good so long as they're actually writing. Once something is written, you can test it, you can analyze it and compare it (this looks like beethoven, this sounds like brahms, this seems like ligeti, etc) and it creates a very precious feedback loop. You don't necessarily have to hear what you wrote, if you analyzed and know your literature, you'll instantly recognize style characteristics you DO know how they sound like (afunctional 3rd chords stringed together with ring a little like french modernism, heavy chromatic lines sound like early atonality, etc.) You can get the "gist" of what you're doing all the same, which is sometimes just enough.

Other times it isn't enough and you need to try it out, which is fine too. Many, MANY composers used a piano for this, or a harpsichord (or organ,) and it's understandable also: our brain can't handle as much information as we think it can. No matter how you imagine X or Y sounds like, you can approximate it as much as you want in your head, the feedback loop is much better if you actually heard it back, rather than having to imagine it. It's simply how we work, we require all the information we can get to make better decisions and having to hear what we wrote is much, much better than having to just imagine it (but like I said above, there are many ways to properly imagine what you wrote that sidestep typical "ear training" nonsense.)

I say yes, because I believe that music is far more independent from its physical realizations (sounds produced by instruments or voices) than is often supposed. Basically, I believe that music is like mathematics (at least according to the "intuitionist" school): an entirely internal and personal edifice of the mind, with an entirely incorporeal inner structure, and which finds its genesis in the primordial intuition of the division of time into equal intervals (i.e. counting).

A fun analogy, it seems to me, is that of chess. Chess exists wholly independently of physical chessmen. Otherwise there could be no such thing as blind chess masters or, more to the point, computer chess. Lastly, I believe it's possible, in principle, that one day a computer program will compose music as lovely as that of Bach or Mozart. But we will have to wait... :)

Computers HAVE already produced music, and in reality if it sounds like Mozart or any other composer it simply depends on the code programmed to make it follow rules. After all, having a computer simulate something ex post facto is easy since we have all the material we want to emulate readily available, all it takes is writing the simulation parameters code.

Another question entirely is if the output of random number generator coded to output musical material and values qualifies as music. I think it does, obviously, but since it's random chances are the output could be very different (and interesting?) I've only tried this a few times, but every time it was a very interesting experience to see what kind of random things would pop up and sounded great.

I think it's exactly the other way round: if music were just the art of sound, then there would be little else but randomness. My tea kettle makes a really lovely and aesthetic sound, but that doesn't alter its being "chance noise". For me music is the art of beautiful temporal proportions, with instrumental and vocal sound as its more or less arbitrary and, arguably, interchangeable medium - simply because most people happen to be much more sensitive to temporal proportion if it's presented in an aural form.

1) You're cool.

2) I want to add, not only it would be possible to teach someone deaf composition, but it's quite likely that it would engage them intellectually if they could get over the fact they can't hear their end product. I think the biggest barrier here is psychological, not something purely technical. You can also teach a blind person to paint, but their inability to engage in a feedback loop with their own work will hinder them invariably psychologically just like it would hinder us to paint on an invisible canvas with invisible ink.

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Music is the art of sound.

If you absolutely cannot hear and never could hear, there is no art, only random realizations.

Is that art?

Well...if you say so.

ARRRGH. Don't forget that music is an art that can often be felt. Sound is vibration. Of course a deaf person can experience and compose music because he/she can feel the music (especially with percussion instruments) and because you don't need to hear music to write it. John Cage, if I remember correctly, said he never heard music in his head. He was an inventor of compositional techniques and processes rather than an organizer of things he heard. And not all of his compositions were aleatoric, or "random realizations."

I think that being well-rounded is an important part of being a musician. Having a rudimentary knowledge of aural skills, theory, keyboard skills, singing skills, music history, and instrumentation is crucial towards truly refining your craft. If you're a doctor that plays in a community band once a month, perhaps you don't need anything other than to know how to effectively play your instrument within an ensemble.

Likewise, I think that being an effective composer involves being a well-rounded musician. You don't HAVE to have the above skills, but I think it's always a good idea. Why limit yourself by not having skills that can be useful? Often when I hear a new piece of music, I try to envision how it would be notated in my mind. I dictate it mentally, and that helps me keep track of what's going on, what's being repeated, etc. etc.

To sum up my response - having respect for your craft enough to have a decent, well-rounded skillset is important.

Wam-Bam out

Aural skills is much like learning theory. As the head of a good music theory department said about theory courses - you do it to understand better what has been. I'd say the same about aural skills - it help you by increasing your aural awareness of what has been.

Mastery of either or does not make one a master of composition because as SSC has said, unless you are aiming for strict style reproductions (which actually is not easy to do a style copy WELL, just ask David Cope, to work within an older style, ask Graham). So, you may ask why? Well how do you hear something which does not yet exist stylistically? Even David Cope known for his computer generated music took him a very long time to find a way to create a "new" style from older styles (eg mixing Gershwin say with Berg).

Really, what characterizes "great" composers is an obsessive compulsiveness to work hard on composition and try and rework many ideas. The latter is somewhat dependent on chance but score study, reading outside music (think of how Mendelssohn's novel and forward ideas for thematic development in his Octet arose from his readings on Goethe), a critical openness to different music (Hadyn and the Croatian folksongs of his childhood, Stravinsky and Russian peasant songs synthesis with Rimsky Korsakoff and Stravinsky's openness later to Webern, and the openness of Continental Europe to the English composers such as Dunstaple).

I do agree with SSC about the over-reliance on restrictive pedagogy to teach aural skills, and the underutilization of score study. The worst is when universities try to cram too many things into one course and call it "Musicianship".