67 Hearing, Picturing, and Notating Melodic Dictation

The Journey of Ear Training

At the start of this book, the following quotes from Robert Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians summed up the aims of studying aural skills.

“A perfect musician must be able to see, in his mind’s eye, any new, and even complicated, piece of orchestral music as if in full score lying before him! This is indeed the greatest triumph of musical intellect that can be imagined. There is no end of learning.”

“Endeavor, even with a poor voice, to sing at first sight without the aid of the instrument; by these means your ear for music will constantly improve.”

“You must get to the point that you can hear music from the page.”

Schumann’s ideal for musicianship was that anyone aspiring to the music profession ought to be able to transcribe melodies and harmonies. Over the past 60+ chapters, we have studied this process.

A Two-Way Street

Success in ear training and sight singing lies in understanding what certain musical concepts look like and sound like – and, moreover, knowing how to match the visual and the auditory without difficulty.

We have learned over the course of the semester that this is not as daunting as it sounds. Melodic and harmonic dictations become much easier when you train your ear to identify patterns, then use the logic of music theory to commit them to the page.

To this end, when you hear a melodic dictation, the first pattern to listen for is the structure of the phrase. Are we hearing period structure, or sentence structure? Please review the following principles:

Sentence (8 measures)

• Measures 1-4: presentation composed of a basic idea (2 measures) + repetition of the basic idea (2 measures)

• Measures 5-8: continuation composed of fragmentation of the basic idea, plus a cadence (can be half cadence, imperfect authentic cadence, or perfect cadence).

Period (8 measures)

• Measures 1-4: antecedent composed of a basic idea (2 measures) + contrasting idea (2 measures), ending with a half cadence (or imperfect authentic cadence).

• Measures 5-8: consequent composed of material from the antecedent, ending with a perfect authentic cadence.