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Survey: sight reading AND teaching by ear, how?

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Home Forums Teaching the Harp Survey: sight reading AND teaching by ear, how?

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  • #89871
    nanja-bakker–2
    Participant

    To all folkharp/aural teachers,

    When teaching by ear (or, the aural way) you could easily do without sheet music.
    But what if you want your student to be versatile, and be sufficient in sight reading as well?
    How and when to introduce sight reading?

    Your approach and experience can help my to write my thesis about teaching by ear!
    It’ll take you about 10 minutes to get through the questions of the below survey. Please feel free to share this survey with other traditional harp teachers around.

    http://www.thesistools.com/web/?id=388082

    Many thanks!

    Nanja Bakker
    Dutch harpist

    #89872

    Why would you teach only by ear? I can’t imagine any advantages to it.

    #142670

    I know this thread has been dormant a while now, but that’s bait I can’t resist rising to…

    Saul – The big advantage to teaching only by ear is that you would get really really good at learning by ear, which in a folk environment is how one learns to play new tunes and new everything. In the same way that classical music is only taught from sheet music!

    #142710

    The “only” is a false polarization. As a musician, one need not be forced to choose between being mute or illiterate. The persistent belief that one must do only one OR the other is painfully damaging.

    Think of it as learning a language. First you learn to speak, then after a titch, you learn to read. Maybe, if the person is keen on notation and writing, you might be able to present them with both at the same time.

    At the end of the day, one must be able to speak extemporaneously and also write one’s ideas down and read others’ ideas in order to live fully.

    I cannot fathom doing only one or the other. If I couldn’t play by ear, I would be completely unable to compose or arrange and totally mute on my instrument without someone else telling me what to say. If I couldn’t read music, I would have millennia of music closed to me without someone else able to communicate it to me directly, not to mention being totally unable to write down my own compositions and arrangements.

    No musician should have to choose between being mute or illiterate.

    Anyhow … I know this can be a somewhat fraught topic, and I hope I haven’t stirred anything up. 🙂 I’m sure we all share the same ultimate goal: of being able to say what we want on our instruments, when we want, fluently and to have fun doing it and sharing it.

    #142729

    Janis, I completely agree with you! I also think both are super-important:) I get a bit tetchy when I think someone (through ignorance, snobbery or otherwise) is in any way devaluing or dismissing the different way things are done in traditional music just because it’s different. Indeed, the are no more advantages to teaching only by ear than teaching only from sheet music, and the most advantages come from doing both. I was merely pointing out that there is a different emphasis in the different traditions on each…but as you say, we are arguing from the same side here…

    #144595

    In a recent harp workshop given in my city by a virtuoso harpist from a South American country, we learned that a performance there of 420 folk harp players came together recently to play a concert, and are listed in the Guiness Book of Records, as the largest harp performance so far. If you go to: 420 Harps on http://www.youtube.com, you will see there are no music stands needed since the players, of all ages, mostly from rural areas of low income, learned to play in groups from a teacher with no printed music involved. You will enjoy their music, all memorized.

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