A friend of mine went on a hike with an artist. As they passed a scene of forested hills, the artist said to my friend, "I can see eighteen shades of green. How many do you see?" "Two", my friend replied, "light green and dark green." The point is not that the artist could tag the shades of green with a name but that her experience was enriched because of her ability to perceive the nuances. The same can be said for our experience of music. To heighten musical awareness and enjoyment, we must cultivate the ear just as much as artists train the eye. Dick Grove, a prominent teacher of jazz theory and harmony, believed that to be complete musicians, we need six ears: a rhythmic ear, a melodic ear, a harmonic ear, an orchestral ear, a stylistic ear and a thematic ear. I would like to talk briefly about each of these six levels of listening as I understand them, to share how I think these skills enhance our piano playing and to suggest some resources for ear-education.

The Rhythmic Ear

Most of us learn the rhythm of a piece by counting. We decipher the proportional durations of the notes then make the music fit the count. Yet somehow, our performance is not quite convincing. Rhythm is by nature instinctual and it needs to sound that way when we play it. To play with instinctual feeling, we need to surpass the arithmetical level to the level of grasping a rhythmic pattern as a whole, as a musical gesture. We can then translate the visual symbols on a page of music into a "kinesthetic sentence" that makes sense musically, physically and psychologically. Our performance will sound natural, spontaneous and alive. Several online resources offer help for rhythmic education. One of these is the practice spot.com rhythm gym which provides progressively more difficult rhythmic drills. A more comprehensive study can be found in the book "Rhythmic Training" by Robert Starer.

The Melodic Ear

Melody may be the most accessible element in music. To hear the inner logic of a melody though requires more refinement in listening. Melodies have length, direction and design. Waves-- small and large--create peaks and lows which define the contour and climax of the line. Every melody has its own unique energy and design which constitutes it's “flowing power." For instance, does the melody droop, swirl, hang, rise, circle, twist, dance? Where does the melody arch? Does the rise and fall of the line give or take energy? What is the focal point of the melody? Are there any motifs that repeat themselves? When we perceive the specific profile and dynamic design of a melody, we will illumine its beauty and shape in performance.

The Harmonic Ear

Years ago there was a film called "E.T." The plot of the movie was built around getting an extra terrestrial being back to his home planet. All the adventures and tribulations endured by E.T. and his human friend Elliot grew from this basic plot. Similarly, in key-centered music, a composer creates drama by using harmonic motion to advance, delay or even divert the journey home to the tonal center. Contemporary music may use a different harmonic logic. In works that are not key-bound, harmonic formations are often like clouds in the sky that shape and re-shape themselves to create spectacular coincidences. Whatever the harmonic logic might be, it falls on us as performers to manifest it. To do this requires a keen harmonic ear. To strengthen our awareness, we can reduce the score to its underlying harmonic components, isolating the flow of basic chord progressions. As we play them, we create a "harmonic stream" --underlying currents of ease and tension which build toward and away from climactic points. The more we project these musical forces, the more revelatory our performances will be. The website www.chordmaps.com offers chord maps ranging from simple to complex illustrating how laws of harmonic attraction work. For a thorough discussion, see the chapters on Harmony in Ernst Toch's book, The Shaping Forces of Music. 

The Orchestral Ear

Timbre is the specific sound-color of one instrument as distinguished from another. For the pianist, developing an orchestral ear means developing the ability to translate the sound of piano tones into orchestral colors. For example, we can take a piece of piano music we are learning and mentally "orchestrate" it by assigning the parts to specific instruments. Imagining a melody with different sound colors affects how we will play it. If we choose the oboe, we might play the melodic line with a stronger more penetrating sound. If we select the flute, we may play with a lighter and more silvery touch. The piano can tend to sound monochromatic but with a lively imagination, we can transform it into a great orchestral instrument. A good way to develop color-hearing is to listen to the music of great orchestrators such as Berlioz or Ravel.

The Stylistic Ear 

Style is the particular way a composer combines the elements of music to make the music his or her own. For instance, Shostakovich's music bears many of his personal earmarks: impish humor, incisive rhythms, falling motives, long lyrical lines. In a more general way, style can also denote a certain genre of music (i.e. sonata, fugue) or the unique characteristics of a certain time period, (i.e. the Baroque era or Romantic era). In performance, we want to be able to define those earmarks on all levels so that we can render the music with the tone, phrasing and articulation appropriate to the time period, the composer and the genre. The website www.cnx.org (subject: Arts) has a learning module entitled Sound Reasoning. In this excellent module, the author Anthony Brandt, a music professor at Rice University, identifies new and accessible ways of listening to music that can help us identify the special style characteristics of a piece. In terms of general period and genre style, we might visit www.naxos.com (under Education). The site provides a short but helpful description of each of the major historic periods and forms in music. 

The Thematic Ear

How many of us can listen to a symphony or a sonata, detect thematic patterns and trace them through the whole structure of a piece without using the score? Thematic patterns, varied and transformed, are the words and phrases of music. Hearing these words and phrases enables us to follow the musical logic of a piece. Bach had an amazing gift for logical musical invention. If you want to test your ears, listen to his two-part Invention no. 1 in C major without the score. See if you can aurally track the two-bar theme as it continually appears in different registers and pitches, turned upside down, broken into smaller segments, extended into longer note values and sometimes even combined with various versions of itself! There are many ways to transform a musical idea. In Schoenberg's economical piano piece Opus 19, No. 2, a persistent little motive permeates the one page piece and remains unaltered except for slight rhythmic displacements as it interacts with the musical material that surrounds it. More on how musical ideas unfold can be found in the Sound Reasoning website mentioned earlier. The section entitled "The Language of Transformation" illustrates how to aurally "catch" thematic and motivic references in a musical work.

Coda

Ultimately, we can only express in music what we can hear. The visual artist who saw eighteen shades of green on the hillside could create eighteen shades of green on her painter's palette. The more we educate the ear, the more intimacy we will enjoy with the music we listen to and perform.

Nancy Fierro is a pianist, recording artist and educator. She has performed nationally and internationally and has produced six commercial albums. Her articles on music have appeared in Creation Magazine, Clavier Magazine and in the Historical Anthology of Women in Music as well as in former issues of the Piano Forte Newsletter.