Aural Education: Reconceptualising Ear Training in Higher Music Learning explores the practice of musical ‘aural training’ from historical, pedagogical, psychological, musicological, and cultural perspectives, and uses these to draw implications for its pedagogy, particularly within the context of higher music education. The multi-perspective approach adopted by the author affords a broader and deeper understanding of this branch of music education, and of how humans relate to music more generally. The book extracts and examines one by one different parameters that appear central to ‘aural training’, proceeding in a gradual and well-organised way, while at the same time constantly highlighting the multiple interconnections and organic unity of the many different operations that take place when we interact with music through any music-related activity. The resulting complex profile of the nature of our relationship with music, combined with an exploration of non-Western cultural perspectives, offer fresh insights on issues relating to musical ‘aural training’. Emerging implications are proposed in the form of broad pedagogical principles, applicable in a variety of different music educational settings. Andrianopoulou propounds a holistic alternative to ‘aural training’, which acknowledges the richness of our relationship to music and is rooted in absorbed aural experience. The book is a key contribution to the existing literature on aural education, designed with researchers and educators in mind.

The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy offers a comprehensive survey of issues, practice, and current developments in the teaching of aural skills. The volume regards aural training as a lifelong skill that is engaged with before, during, and after university or conservatoire studies in music, central to the holistic training of the contemporary musician. With an international array of contributors, the volume captures diverse perspectives on aural-skills pedagogy, and enables conversation between different regions. It addresses key new developments such as the use of technology for aural training and the use of popular music. This book will be an essential resource and reference for all university and conservatoire instructors in aural skills, as well as students preparing for teaching careers in music.

Aural, theory and musicianship text book with fully interactive PDF for senior level music classes (VCE, TCE etc)

Developing Musicianship Through Aural Skills is a comprehensive method for learning to hear, sing, understand, and use the foundations of music as a part of an integrated and holistic curriculum for training professional musicians. Each chapter is organized to take advantage of how our minds and instincts naturally hear and understand music and provides a variety of exercises for practicing and integrating the structure into your musical vocabulary. Developing Musicianship Through Aural Skills will provide you with the musical terms, progressions, resolutions, and devices that you will be able to draw upon as a functional and usable musical vocabulary. Ear training exercises on the companion website reinforce both discrete structures (intervals, chords, etc.) as well as all rhythmic and melodic material, and sections are provided to open discussion and reflection on the skills and attitudes professional musicians need to be successful. Features: Easy to Understand Explanations: Topics are logically ordered and explained to help the student make connections to their theory instruction and common usage. A Complete Method: Detailed instructions are given for singing and hearing structures as they most commonly appear in music., providing students with a proven, reliable process for creating and discerning musical structures. Exercises: Ideas for drill, pitch patterns, rhythms, melodies, duets, sing and plays, and examples from the literature help the student to integrate each chapter’s material. Reflections: Discussions of topics that help students to develop as a person, a professional, and an artist, and to integrate aural skills into their musical education. Companion Website: Ear Training tools and video demonstrations. You can find the companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/developingmusicianship.

Research indicates that aural skills are vital in developing musical expertise, yet the precise nature of those skills and the emphasis placed upon them in educational contexts merit closer attention and exploration. This book assesses the relevance of aural in a university music degree and as a preparation for the professional career of a classical musician. By way of the discussion of four empirical studies, two main areas are investigated: firstly, the relationship between university music students’ aural ability and their overall success on a music degree programme, and, secondly, the views of music students and professional musicians about aural and its relevance to their career are analysed. The subject is investigated particularly in the light of the current socio-educational background of the past fifty years, which has greatly influenced the participation of music and the study and development of musicianship. Many related issues are touched upon as part of the research for this project, and these emerge as relevant topics in the discussion of aural. Apart from students’ and musicians’ views on training and singing, aspects considered include the role of improvisation, memorisation and notation, examinations, absolute pitch and the affinity with language, all of which have a part to play in the debate about the importance of aural.

In higher music education, learning in social settings (orchestras, choirs, bands, chamber music and so on) is prevalent, yet understanding of such learning rests heavily on the transmission of knowledge and skill from master to apprentice. This narrow view of learning trajectories pervades in both one-to-one and one-to-many contexts. This is surprising given the growing body of knowledge about the power of collaborative learning in general, underpinned by theoretical developments in educational psychology: the social dimensions of learning, situational learning and concepts of communities of learners. Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education seeks to respond to the challenge of becoming more conscious of the creative and multiple dimensions of social interaction in learning music, in contexts ranging from interdisciplinary projects to one-to-one tuition, and not least in the contemporary context of rapid change in the cultural industries and higher education as a whole. It brings together theoretical papers and case studies of practice. Themes covered include collaborative creativity, communities of practice, peer-learning, co-teaching as co-learning, assessment and curriculum structures. Chapters illuminate reasons for enabling collaborative learning, and provide exemplars of innovative practice and designs for collaborative learning environments in higher music education. A central purpose of the book is to scaffold change, to help in meeting the rapid changes in society and to find constructive stepping stones or signposts for teachers and students.

Aural History is an anti-memoir memoir of encountering devastating grief that uses experimental storytelling to recreate the winding, fractured path of loss and transformation. Written by a thirty-something psychotherapist and queer theorist, Aural History is structured as a sequence of three sections that each use different narrative styles to represent a distinctive stage in the protagonist's evolving relationship to trauma. Aural History explores how a cascade of self-dissolving losses crisscrosses a girl's coming of age. Through lyric prose, the first section follows a precocious tomboy whose fierce attachment to her father forces her, when he dies and she is twelve years old, to run the family bakery business, raise a delinquent younger brother, and take care of a destructive, volatile mother. In part two, scenes narrated in the third person illustrate a high-achieving high school student who is articulate and in control except for bouts of sudden and inchoate attractions, the first of which is to her severe and coaxing English teacher. The third story tells of her relation with a riveting, world-famous professor, interspersed with a tragic-comic series of dialogues between the protagonist and a cast of diverse psychotherapists as she, now twenty-five years old and living in New York City, undertakes an odyssey to understand why true self-knowledge remains elusive and her real feelings, choked and incomplete. In what Phillip Lopate calls "an amazing document," Aural History pushes the narrative conventions of memoir to capture a story the genre of memoir usually struggles to tell: that you can lose yourself, and have no way to know it. Gila Ashtor is a critical theorist, writer and psychoanalyst based in New York City. She graduated with an MA in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Literature from Tufts University in 2016. Her research specializations include queer theory, psychoanalysis, trauma, affect studies and pedagogy. Her academic writing focuses on the relationship between queer theory and psychoanalysis and is the subject of her forthcoming book, Homo Psyche: Queer Theory and Metapsychology. Her clinical writing is primarily oriented to post-Freudian technique and theory and specifically explores the metapsychology of Jean Laplanche in the context of affect and sexuality studies. She is an Editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and is completing her MFA in Nonfiction at Columbia University. Currently, she is a psychoanalyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training & Research (IPTAR) in New York City, where she treats adults and children.