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Teaching Students to Listen

Matthew Temple | February 2010


   
After years of study to hone their aural skills, most band directors become adept at listening to ensembles and picking out problems with articulation, balance, and the myriad of other possible problems that creep into rehearsals. While a director’s position at the podium assists his listening, each player has a different vantage point, depending on where he sits in the ensemble; and each needs the director’s help in learning who to listen to and what to listen for. How a student relates his sound to the members of his section and the rest of the ensemble determine how convincing an ensemble will sound.

Levels of Listening

    Every student musician in an ensemble should become an expert at listening critically to the sound around him, simultaneously monitoring his own sound, the section’s sound, and the ensemble’s. Most important, he should listen for good tone because an individual player’s contribution is the most fundamental aspect of developing an ensemble sound. Each musician should monitor his tone, pitch center, relative volume, and articulation, with the goal of matching these elements to the others in his section and be­yond. This is the essence of good blend.
    In general, a musician in an ensemble can distinctly hear the players on either side of him and the people directly behind him. Now if each player upholds his responsibility to listen closely to those around him, the result becomes a kind of web of listening across the ensemble as the musicians balance and blend their individual contributions in relation to the full ensemble.

Seating Arrangements

    There is a high correlation between a band’s seating arrangement and the listening relationships among its musicians. Many directors like to experiment with seating, moving players around based primarily on how an ensemble sounds from the audience’s perspective, but it is equally important to design seating arrangements keeping the players’ listening relationships in mind. This includes grouping the principal players from different sections as closely together as possible.
    It is useful to have players think of themselves as members of small chamber ensembles within the context of a large wind ensemble. For example, if the music requires four horn parts, then the players should think of their section as a horn quartet. The more obvious chamber sections include the saxophone quartet and clarinet choir. Finally, it is also helpful to base seating arrangements on the instrumental groupings for each composition an ensemble performs.

Listening Versus Watching
    In an ensemble there is a critical balance between listening to others and watching the conductor because sound is directional. A good balance of both skills directly influences an ensemble’s ability to unify all the musical ideas in a score, especially the sense of pulse. Students learn to develop a strong sense of internal pulse by breathing in time together with the performers around them and by learning to subdivide the beat at different tempos. The ultimate test of good ensemble pulse is whether all the performers can align the audible result.
    The relationship between listening and watching is different for nearly every performer, a dilemma based on a person’s seating location in the ensemble. I refer to this problem as the geography of the ensemble, and it is similar to that of a marching band performing on a football field but on a smaller scale. In terms of pulse, the farther a student is from the conductor, the more he must rely on what he sees and not what he hears.
    If performers in the back of an ensemble listen to musicians in the front of the group, then they will sound late. Instead, they have to play consistently on top of the pulse to have their sound arrive in time. For example, tuba players have to play on top of the audible beat in marches, otherwise the ensemble’s pulse drags.
    Similarly, players toward the back of an ensemble have a greater ability to influence the style and articulation of the group because their sound travels forward through the ensemble. This can be both a blessing and a curse depending upon the players’ attention to musical details. Conversely, players in the front of the ensemble generally have to spend more time listening to those in the back.
    Players seated directly in front of the conductor are often guilty of playing ahead of the pulse. Because of their proximity to the conductor, they tend to follow what they see rather than waiting for the rest of the ensemble sound to arrive.
    In particular, upper woodwind players should  play in time with the ensemble’s pulse and not create their own. The higher acoustics of these instruments make it is easy for players to simply listen to the higher tessitura of sound that immediately surrounds them. Good listening relationships across the ensemble will help to avoid this problem.

Listening for a Groove
    The relationship between listening and watching is different for each composition. During rehearsals the conductor should help players decide which section is the primary time keeper at any moment in a work and for how long.
It is important to identify motor rhythms that create an underlying groove in a piece. Composers often use percussion or low winds to establish a groove, but an ostinato can appear in any voice, such as the ride cymbal and bass drum in Shortcut Home by Dana Wilson (Boosey & Hawkes/Hal Leonard), measures 71-72.

    Training players to listen for this compositional technique will help them to unify the ensemble pulse.
    A simpler version of an ostinato is what I call the audible metronome, such as a wood block scored alongside a trumpet ostinato in Percy Grainger’s Children’s March (Hal Leonard), measure 283.

Low Winds and Percussion
    Time and again my attention focuses on the low winds and percussion in establishing good listening relationships. Because the bass voices are the foundation of the ensemble sound, all members of a group must listen to them for pitch center, balance, and pulse. Playing chorales develops the ears and is a useful exercise to help critical listening become habitual.
    Often times, I have the low winds lead the ensemble through a chorale and do not conduct. Because of their location toward the back of the ensemble, low winds and percussionists often have to memorize the auditory sensation of how far ahead of the audible beat to play. The conductor should provide feedback to them so they can consistently do well. I also suggest training percussionists to breathe like wind players so they can correctly align their attacks with other instrumentalists. The time spent developing the leadership of the low winds and percussion will be beneficial only if the director holds the rest of the ensemble accountable for following them.

Functional and Harmonic Relationships

    Training students to understand the function of each performer’s part, especially in terms of its texture and harmony, contributes to good listening in an ensemble. This includes learning to identify the voices in a texture – the melody, countermelody, bass line, and harmony – and then deciding which ones to emphasize and how much.
    Different types of textures require different balances. For example, the independent lines of a polyphonic texture might have relatively equal sounding voices, whereas a homophonic texture would have a clear melodic line that has more emphasis than its accompanying voices. Directors usually adjust the dynamics of individual parts to create good balance. One lesson I teach students is that dynamics are relative. An mp marking might indicate a certain volume in one passage, but a softer or louder volume in another passage.
    I often ask players whether a particular line is in unison or harmony. Although this seems basic, performers will only be able to answer it if they listen carefully. I also ask players to identify the exact moment at which the music splits from a unison line into a harmonic line and vice versa, such as in the opening of Sousa’s Hands Across the Sea (Barnhouse).

Students should also be able to identify pedal tones to help align their pitch center.

    Good intonation in harmonic passages is the result of critical listening. Performers should be able to identify the quality of any chord, including triads and seventh chords, as well as added chord tones, such as a suspended fourth or a ninth. Listening for these harmonies will help them determine the relative balance of notes in a given texture, such as in Eric Whitacre’s October (Hal Leonard) with its chain suspensions throughout the work.


We take time to discuss the color of a melodic line, or of a given harmonic texture, the goal being to determine which instruments should be more prominent than others.

Establishing Listening Relationships
    While working on listening skills with a student, I may ask him to identify the other instruments that are playing with him at a given moment. If the student can’t, the band replays the passage. It is extremely important to have your players identify each level of listening – to himself, the section, and the ensemble – for themselves, rather than spoon feed them from the podium.

    I may ask students to close their eyes and play a chorale or short excerpt from memory because this trains them to hear the subtleties of balance and blend. Each player has to take personal responsibility for listening to others and to the ensemble.
 
    A final consideration is the players themselves. In any ensemble the conductor has to think about the strengths and weaknesses of each performer because this will often determine who will lead a particular listening relationship. One player might have a strong sense of internal pulse, making him useful as a time keeper. Another might have a great sense of pitch center, so players could listen in to him.

    Conductors have the ultimate responsibility of drawing the players’ attention to the listening that is necessary to perform a work convincingly. It is not enough to simply tell them what to listen for; rather conductors should train their players to make independent decisions about listening that they can apply to works they will study in the future.