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"Ear training is an integral piece of the puzzle for the professional musician. Having a good ear means better communication in any musical setting, including stage, recording studio, and teaching studio. If a note, chord, or rhythm is heard that elicits a response (whether good or bad), how cool is it to know exactly what the sound was and why it worked—or didn't! In those circumstances, I feel as if I'm in on a little secret that nonmusicians never get to experience."
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Kaye Kelly, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"The concepts we study in ear training classes teach students to recognize, interpret, and notate musical sounds and ideas. These skills are invaluable to developing musicianship and completely necessary to succeed in a competitive field. I try as much as possible to make my classes relate to what students might be doing when they graduate from Berklee. We listen and analyze all styles of music and discuss real life musical situations they might find themselves in."
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Rosey Lee, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"I hope my students understand that music is like a spoken language, and musical events are just like daily life. For example, counterpoint. This term may be scary for a lot of people, so I tell my students, 'You're listening to me, and you're sitting there with your heart beating, and you're still breathing. You have at least three things going on together simultaneously, and they all cooperate by themselves naturally. That's three- or four-part counterpoint.' If Bach can do it without a laptop, you can as well."
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Brian Lewis, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"Ear training is all about becoming a literate musician—mastering the fundamentals, covering everything musicians might encounter in their career. Acquiring a good ear doesn't happen by turning a magic key. It happens through performing experience or a systematic progressive approach that slowly builds and reinforces musical concepts through performance-related and recognition activities."
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Daryl Lowery, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"My playing is rooted in African American styles: jazz, r&b, and funk. But for fun I listen to classical music and rock, including stuff I grew up on, like Led Zeppelin and the Who. I also have a graduate degree in software engineering, but in my computer applications class I teach that technology is not an end in itself—it's a tool to make our life easier when we make music."
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Yumiko Matsuoka, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"If people want to continue as professional musicians in any way, ear training will be essential for their growth. People who write have to be able to express what they hear in their heads in an efficient way. Sometimes it takes time for students to find out what ear training can do for them and their career. But once they do, they go, 'Oh, wow—this is what I have to do to achieve my goals.' It might be a long road, but I'm hoping that it's a fascinating discovery. I'm still learning myself. I learn as I teach. And I love it."
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"It may be a little sacrilegious, but I don’t really care if students never use solfège again after they get out of here. But I do care that they have an increased depth of understanding about the music-making process and are sensitive enough to be able to hear details in music that they’re listening to. Although, at a party it’s nice every now and then to be able to scat Donna Lee in solfège. That’s always fun. To really impress the person you’re trying to go home with, play a few pop solos in solfège; you’ll knock ’em right off their feet."
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"In my Ear Training classes, I like to keep the focus moving around the room, doing relays of rhythms and solfège, for example. I want everyone to participate and contribute. I don’t like to stand in front of the class and lecture; I like to keep the energy flowing and mix things up, to get performance and listening and analysis all going in the same session. Ear training in particular is something that involves a lot of interaction, a lot of back and forth."
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Giovanni Moltoni, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Ear Training Department"We are very visually oriented as a society. If you study harmony, you read a book, you learn some notions, then you repeat these notions, and you feel like you are good. In ear training that's not necessarily the case, because you can listen to something and still not recognize it. It takes a much longer time. Sometimes students who are successful in notion-based classes like harmony are not able to successfully reproduce a melodic shape. I've always thought that when students are able to successfully engage their mind this way, that's when they actually become musicians. Before that they are not musicians—they are students."
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"I teach solfège, and wrote the two solfège books that the Ear Training Department uses. It's essentially learning how to look at a piece of paper and know in your head what it sounds like, or hear something and know how to write it down. When my daughter was in kindergarten, she read little booklets with 10 words that told the story. Ear Training 1 is like kindergarten. You repeat those little elements a lot. You work on intervals, you work on chords, you work on little rhythms, and eventually you put them all together. When students reach their four required semesters of ear training or solfège, they're ready to read major compositions."
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