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To be or not to be?

November 29, 2005 at 7:38 AM

I think I came to a realization tonight...I can't make it as a music major. I am great at theory but I can't do ear training to save my life. I'll be lucky to get a C in that class. I spent 2.5 hours doing 5 melodic dictations tonight and I didn't even start the rythmic dictation. I think the real reason I'm so bad at ear training is not because I don't have a good ear, my violin teacher tells me otherwise and so do a lot of other people, my mind just get's confused. I can catch the first measure and the last 2 measures. It drives me insane, if it's 4 bars I can do it but if its 8 bars and has ties or dotted rythms my mind goes, "wow, that was a lot of notes" and I just can't do it. Practice doesn't really seem to help either. In fact, my grades in ear training have actually not improved much at all. I'm about ready to snap.

I have a viola lesson tomorrow, gag me. I have no interest in my viola lessons. Over the break I didn't practice viola at all and I even hardly touched violin as well. I was also supposed to buy a suzuki accompaniment book for the viola but I'm like, what, $11.00 for a book that I may never really use in college since I'm not switching to viola, I think not. I'm also supposed to play viola in seminar next week on Monday. Well, I'm not sure if I have an accompanist. The bad part is, yes I'm stressing over it now, but when it comes down to it, I couldn't care much less. I stress about it because I don't want to hear from Spencer and listen to him speak of his high expectations. Frankly, I'm tired of it.

You know, if I'm not a music major I don't know what else to do. I don't really want to do anything else. I love music and I want to share it with the world through teaching and performing. However, in light of ear training, my future looks bleak as a music major. Well, I agreed to help a friend out early tomorrow so thus my rant ends.

My violin teacher told me to do dictation in terms of the violin. So the process was I would hear something to dictate, imagine playing it and where the fingers would go, then know the note names because of where I was imagining my fingers. I breezed through it while everybody else was struggling and failing trying to compare what they were hearing with pitches they tried to pull out of the air. The harmonic aspect is the same, or else simply hearing the quality of the chord and knowing where it fits in theory-wise. Listen for the top and bottom notes for the right inversion. My ear training teacher was a jazz pianist, so it got unusual sometimes. He kept it relatively simple though.
P.S. As an experiment try writing down part of something that's familiar but you don't know the notes for, like a melody from a Brandenburg for instance. Chances are you can just write it out real quickly and not make many mistakes.
PPS. Obviously by "familiar with" I mean knowing exactly what it sounds like of course.
Over and out...
Might I suggest that you join one of the choirs (providing of course that they sing from the score) as I've found this excellent ear training, as a string player you'll have an advantage over the first study singers, who are almost all musically inferior to instrumentalists, it's just a fact. So join a choir and you should be fine, that's what I did and my ear is bloody brilliant! *gives modest glance* lol
You're right. Music majors don't get very far.
BUT!!!!
I'm basically showing up for my college jazz band every class, just not paying, no credit hours. Maybe you can arrange something like that, too. Also, I play every week at church, and I'm currently working with two young girls who want to play at church, too. They like it as much as I do. You should see if you can get involved. If nothing else, start your own band or orchestra. Go to my profile and click on my homepage link (Jazz for Enrichment). That was a jazz band I created for my senior project in high school. We performed and everything, and had an odd instrumentation, but it all worked out perfectly.
Yeah, get involved without taking all those courses, and you'll never have to worry about making up for the loss of money from music. If nothing else (you can't see yourself doing any other job) you can always stand on the corner and play fiddle for a living. Just don't forget your coffee mug.