Aural Skills: Suggestions for self-improvement

If you just need or want to practise your skills in ways which are directly preparatory to the
AuS core assessments, please use the Workbooks (one for each level) on AIR (search for
‘Aural Skills Workbook’). If you think you are below the necessary standard, or find it
challenging, or simply want to develop your skills and make them better, you might try the
following.

1. Pitch-related skills

For most of the steps below you may need to get scores – obtained easily from the Academy
library as well as on-line from IMSLP – and/or listen to recordings – CDs from the library,
countless tracks on You-tube, Spotify, Naxos on-line (free via the library page on AIR, within
the Academy). You might want to have a piano or keyboard close at hand to check pitches.

1. Recall melodies that you know but for which you haven’t seen or can’t remember the
score. Write them down; it doesn’t matter what note you start on as long as the following
notes are right in relation to it.
2. Listen to music you don’t know and try and write down the principal line or melody. Start
with shorter extracts, maybe even only a bar or two and gradually extend. Check in the
score to give yourself a starting note or bar or phrase, then carry on by ear. Start with
music that is mainly diatonic (using notes of the major and minor scales) and progress to
music that is gradually more chromatic and eventually atonal, eg.
a) Bach Keyboard Suites: slower dance movements
b) Haydn and Mozart string quartet slower movements or minuets
c) Schubert songs
d) Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, etc.
e) Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, etc.
3. Repeat 2 above with contrapuntal music eg. Bach 2-part inventions, then 3-part
sinfonias, Chorale preludes, fugues, the Goldberg Variations, particularly imitative pieces
and try to write down (gradually) all the voices for short then longer extracts.
4. Repeat 2 above with music by Haydn, Mozart, then later composers, trying to write down
the bass line.
5. Listen to eg. Haydn and Mozart slower movements or minuets and identify cadences at
the ends of phrases.
6. Listen to eg. Haydn and Mozart slower movements or minuets and identify dominant
7ths, diminished 7ths.
7. Listen to eg. Haydn and Mozart slower movements or minuets and identify all the
harmonies using Roman-numeral labels.
8. Listen to Bel Canto or Verdi operatic recitative and try to identify chords and keys,
possibly by letter name rather than Roman-numeral labels.
9. Listen to Haydn and Mozart Sonata-Form development sections and identify principal
bass notes and hence a series of harmonies and keys.
10. Gradually combine all of the above in music that is progressively more complex.
If you find it difficult even to recognise intervals and chords at first, you can try just replaying
and replaying even fractions of bars, referring to a piano to check, until you can identify each
bit. But try to work towards treating all the above as memory exercises: wean yourself off
dictating melodies etc. note by note and try to memorise progressively larger chunks of
melody or larger texture. What is the pattern? Is there some imitation, some sequence, are
there two 4-bar phrases; the first leading to V, the answering one returning to I? Does the
melody move by step, or using the notes of a chord (which one)?

The above exercises are incorporated in some form or another into many of the exercises in
the Workbooks, available on AIR, which also contain Specimen Exam Questions.

All the above are linked to hearing and recognising pitches and analysing combinations of
them to work out melodies and harmonic structures. Turning the process around, there is
probably no better way of improving your ability to work with pitches and the relationships
between them than looking at pitch structures on a score – melodies and/or harmonies – and
trying to hear the sound of them in your head. We test our ability to do this by sight-singing
exercises.

11. Look for appropriate material for your level among scores in the library and on-line; sit
down with a piano and score and try and sing it. As with 2 above, start with diatonic or
strictly modal lines (maybe Renaissance polyphony) then progress through more
chromatic (eg. Schubert songs) to atonal (late pieces by Stravinsky, etc.). Vocal scores
are obviously likely to be useful, but gradually widen your horizons and you should
eventually feel you can tackle anything within your vocal range. There are also Aural-
skills training books dealing with sight-singing. See the BMus Handbook Aural Skills
pages for a bibliography.

2. Rhythm-related skills

You can repeat many of steps 1 to 10 above for improving your skills in rhythm dictation:
where you were writing down melodies above, instead write down rhythms. Again start
easier and shorter and work gradually into music of greater complexity, perhaps with more
dotted rhythms, syncopation, changes of meter, etc., always trying to do it by remembering
chunks of progressively greater length.

Again, the Viennese classics are a good place to start; Bach can sometimes be more
challenging; and Stravinsky is a good place to be aiming for.

For rhythm reading, again use scores, but the rhythm books listed in the BMus Handbook
bibliography may be even more useful. There are some exercises in the Workbooks on
AIR, along with Colin Huehns’ excellent coordination exercises for both levels.

Chris Atkinson, July 2016