As I have already mentioned in my previous post I would like to drive your attention to the ears and on the fact how important it is to listen, especially when you are a singer. If you need a quick recap, you can find the previous entry here.
It is almost obvious that in order to have decent communication with eachother in any circumstances, we need to listen to eachother very carefully. Listening with care requires more concentration in the beginning, but you can train yourself to be more precise when it comes to listen to someone else. When it comes to music and especially intonation problems, you can easily solve your intonation problems by giving more attention to the note that you're singing and listening. At conservatories and music schools, students (mostly singers) get the critique that their intonation may not be perfect. Now, it is important to know that as a singer you have mainly three possible reasons to get this comment:
- You push instead of using the natural support
- You don't listen carefully enough
- Both of them from above at the same time
One would think that a musician or a singer has perfect ears (not perfect pitch!) and we don't have any problems with listening. Actually, in most cases it's not true. Many of taking listening for granted and we don't train our ears and the brain funtion, called "listening" carefully enough, that's why careless listening results slight or big intonation problems. Here I wouldn't mention different tunings since it's not relevant yet.
Those who don't have natural affinity towards music and considered not having musical ears, are actually people who don't use their relevant brain function to listening. They listen in a superficial way. I have had singing pupils who had difficulties to sing back a note played on the piano, but could perfectly sing back the same note when I was singing it for them. It is not only the fact that it is easier to resonate together with another human being, than with a musical instrument, but it is also a proof that people not having musical ears can train themselves to a certain level to be able to do so. They probably won't reach the quality of a professional solo instrumentalist or singer, but they can become pretty good ensemble players.
Listening is also a question of sensitivity. Artists in general are different from people whom are not involved in the arts, because they sense and experience the world around them in a different way. When musicians and singers hear a note, their brain literally translates it to a musical note and they are able to sing or hum it back, but when a non-musician hears a note, it is just a note, so he/she will hum back some note and not exactly the same. Why? For their senses it doesn't really matter what note it is, for us, musicians it does, especially when we make music together or improvise.
Unfortunately, improvisation went out of fashion in the 20th-century among classical musicians and singers (fortunately, improvistation is an essential element of jazz), but it is slowly coming back to practice. In the 19th-century it was a common thing to improvise on concerts and it belonged to any musical training. I wish someday a classical music education model would rise and spread all over the world, that includes lots of improvisation and ear-training...
