The Child Who Can Play by Ear Has the Wrong Kind of Evidence

Imagine a student who can hear when the bass player has changed the direction of a song. Several good things can follow. The student stops crowding the low notes. They hold a phrase that otherwise feels late. They look at the drummer and understand why the room is about to change. Then they sit down for a written paper and struggle to name the inversion. Both pieces of evidence are real. They say something about different achievements.

Notation is an astonishing technology for coordinating across distance and time. Musicians who have never met can begin a rehearsal with a shared account of the work. A careful reader can study a part without needing a model performance. An institution is sensible to teach this capacity. It is much more suspect when ease of written assessment becomes evidence that aural knowledge is in some way secondary.

Making an ability visible

A musician can know a thing well enough to use it and need time to describe it. An ensemble can hear an imbalance and correct it without naming anything. There may also be a student who can use every appropriate word and still cannot tell where their playing caused the change. Both students have more to learn. The mischief lies in giving one of them a reputation for being theoretical and the other a reputation for being intuitive, as though the person who made a rapid decision from sound had done little thinking.

The system can overcorrect. A stable terminology lets students trace a pattern in a second song. It makes a difficult thing discussable with people who did not happen to hear the same performance. A player who is ashamed of reading can miss work they would enjoy. Ear training has a lot to gain from literacies that let people share what they heard. The order matters. There should first be an experience that gives somebody a reason to use the name.

The damage of hierarchy comes out when children practise. A child can learn to avoid telling adults the part of the music they are most aware of. They can describe themselves as bad at theory even as they make the decisions theory was invented to help people discuss. After a while they may go in search of the kind of success that teachers can report. Those years can train a remarkably sensitive listener to distrust the thing they are already doing well.

What if the room heard the decision first? Give the terms their full force after the person who heard the change has had the chance to say why they think it matters.