By Catherine Elcik

“Ear training makes you literate,” says Matt Marvuglio, a virtuoso flutist, composer, and Dean of the Performance Division at Berklee College of Music. “When you first start reading words, you’re trying to pronounce them, and after a while you start seeing sentences. Ear training is just learning the language of music. It’s harmonic and melodic vocabulary.”

Basic Ear Training 1, co-authored by Marvuglio and Roberta Radley, Assistant Chair in the Ear Training Department at Berklee, is designed to approach ear training in a way that allows performers to put theory on hold and get straight to making music. Starting with basic rhythms, Marvuglio and Radley have designed a class that focuses on tendency tones. Students are trained to hear the interval without the added burden of naming it. “This course is really coming in through the back door,” Marvuglio says. “It’s designed to make your ears catch up to what you play.”

Because ear training is a new skill for many of his students, the course begins with a three week introduction to rhythm and basic solfege. The first week’s lesson on conducting basic rhythms helps students hear the pulse of a beat. Students will sing rhythms –first with the piano and then without—all the while conducting the basic rhythm. This gives the students an idea of how well they can match pitch naturally.

In week two, the course focuses on how music pulses differently in each common time signature. “So when you’re listening to the time signature, you can hear different clues that will allow you to recognize if it’s in 2/4, 3/4, 4/4,” Marvuglio says. “We talk about drummers using snare on two and four—that’s a clear indicator. What’s the basis for a march? What’s the basis for 4/4 time? Swing? Latin rhythms?”

By week three, with students feeling secure about their ability to conduct, sing rhythms, and match pitch, students are asked to sing a major scale using solfege syllables. They are also introduced to tendency tones and resolutions. Using a broad selection of music that includes Ella Fitzgerald, The Temptations, Whitney Houston, and music from film, the students translate these melodies to solfege. “We give students the first note, then ask them to sing the scale and figure out the melody through solfege,” Marvuglio says.

Interactive Practice Activities

Dean Matt Marvuglio describes topics of the first lesson.

Learn 4/4 conducting pattern.

Once in solfege, students start to hear how the singers use inflections and embellishments to personalize melodies. “The way Ella sings, she slips into it, she slides,” Marvuglio says. “So right away, you get this scale, and you have to say, ‘hey, I have to put inflection on this.’ And with Whitney, students pack every embellishment in there before they have to decide which syllables to leave out. You learn you can’t sing every note—do do, do ti, do re do re me re re me re do do—or you’ll hurt yourself.”

In weeks four, five, and six, the students continue to practice solfege by learning new scales and going through a number of cadence patterns. “This whole course is based on learning how to hear tension resolve,” Marvuglio says. “If you can hear these tensions resolve then you are hearing these different intervallic patterns without really getting into a lot of complex theoretical jargon.”

By lesson six, students will be able to identify a blues form and hear the basic changes in tonic, subdominant, and dominant cadence patterns in the music of Dave Matthews, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin, and more.

Students are asked to add notation to the solfege in lesson seven. Marvuglio and Radley teach students notation exercises that allow them to write rhythms and melodies using Finale. Students then notate songs by James Taylor, Rickie Lee Jones and Led Zeppelin.

In lesson 8, students learn to use a moveable do system to help them determine what key a song is in. “They should be able to hear do in whatever music is going on,” Marvuglio says. “We’re really trying to stay away from the written page as much as possible because when you’re performing—especially with pop music—you don’t have your head buried in a piece of music.”

After a lesson on recognizing song forms in week nine, the course moves on to cover relative minor in week ten. From there, the class repeats the previous exercises on tonic, subdominant, and dominant tendencies in minor keys. The course culminates in a final project, either composing a tune and notating it or writing a practice routine and sharing it with the class.

“This class provides students with analytical tools,” Marvuglio says. “What time signature is it in? What’s the form? You start thinking critically about the music. When you sit in with somebody you’ll feel more confident because you can hear things.”

Learn 3/4 conducting pattern.

Dean Matt Marvuglio explains tonic / dominant relationships.