ABSTRACT
The need for ‘aural training’ in formal music education can be seen as a result of the elimination of former integrated learning practices and the concomitant fragmentation of musical learning within nineteenth-century conservatories. The combined exploration of eight central ‘aural training’ parameters shows our relationship to music to be permeated by a number of salient overarching characteristics, emerging on the whole as both specialised and integrated, both complex and holistic, both implicit and explicit, both universal and subjective. These traits appear to be part of human nature and thus have remained constant within the changing context of Western formal music education of the last two centuries or so. It is proposed that awareness of these overarching characteristics of how we relate to music in general and to our music culture in particular can transform ‘aural training’ into a more comprehensive type of aural education, by being translated into pedagogical principles, methods, and approaches, as well as into educational/philosophical perspectives.
