Ear Training with Joanne Graf

Calling all ears! Whether you are a vocalist or an instrumentalist, one of the most critical parts of your skill set is your trained ear. In addition to improving your intonation and ensemble awareness, you will learn a lot about a tune with a well-trained ear before you even try to play or sing it. You will also be able to do some valuable practicing without touching your instrument or using your voice. Sound impossible? It’s not, and because you have been living in this part of the world, your ear already knows what to expect in certain places of many tunes, though you may not have words for what you hear.

By expanding on your current instincts and starting on a basic level, you will learn how notes in a scale relate to each other, how they set harmony in motion, and some options for harmonizing and seconding. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to listen in a new way to the music around you with much more depth and understanding of what’s going on both within and under a tune, whether it’s the church chimes down the block, a radio station tag, or a melody you wrote on your own.

Some skills to be addressed will be:

• Pitch matching
• Establishing root/tonal center
• Relative pitch
• Scale structure
• Chord identification
• Chord structure
• Key changes

This is an adult class open to students aged 13 and up.