ABSTRACT

Within every view of musicianship we will find those perceptions, skills and responses that we refer to as ‘aural’. The need for a label is the result of music having become a subject, an activity to be trained in. For it is only because we refer to printed scores, because we can study music silently, that the need is felt to stress the fundamental and overriding place of the ear in music. The totally aural tradition of most musics of the world means that they would have no need of the arguments reviewed here, though we can learn much from them. Even for formally-educated, British musicians, the idea of listening as ‘the normal mode of all musical experience’ is surely undeniable, though Brian Loane’s argument (1984) that ‘listening is the whole of music education’ may be too strong for some.