YOUR CRAFT

Our goal is to improve your techniques, from wherever you are today, and consolidate them into an integrated craft. You will acquire the tools to develop your craft, which will serve you for the rest of your musical life.

What is your craft? It is your ability to input, process and output music, whether you are composing, orchestrating, improvising or performing written music.

Stage one. Hearing effectively requires active listening-focusing your ear; developing your ability to isolate one voice, or linear part within a polyphonic texture or to identify significant tones in chords or clusters. We provide exercises to develop active listening.

Stage two. Processing is the intermediate stage, where you perceive, organize, analyze, manipulate, whatever you have to do in order to output music for the purpose at hand. Most important is knowing what you are hearing; your ability to instantly identify any musical sonority. Your perception of music is personal, shaped by your experience. We use music transcription to train your ear to be open to new and unfamiliar experiences.

Stage three. Your musical output, your skill at putting notes on paper or sequencing or improvising or performing music. Your developed craft will enable you to work efficiently, whether you are composing, orchestrating, arranging, transcribing, singing or playing an instrument.

Your craft is your collective musical techniques; your proficiency in working with music. By concentrating on each stage separately, you can find your strengths and weaknesses and develop each part of the process to your fullest potential. When the components are reassembled, your craft becomes an integrated, subconscious, efficient and personal process. Then you can go about writing and playing music in a direct, intuitive manner. Your perception will be immediate and accurate and your notation or performance true and confident.

Developing your craft is the main objective of Hearing and Writing Music.