Teaching Elementary Aural Skills - How Current Brain Research May Help

Abstract

Paula Telesco interweaves the current state of aural skills teaching with cognitive studies, shedding new light on how we approach teaching skills. "All music departments share at least one common goal: to cultivate the musicianship of all their students, enabling each to be a better musician than he or she was upon entering the program. In a general sense, that means increasing the literacy and fluency of all music students. It may, therefore, behoove us to revisit and reevaluate what most of us would probably agree is a standard Aural Skills curriculum to determine whether the model is still as universally valid as it once was, and if not, to consider plausible alternatives."