John Crooks

I specialize in teaching core pitch and rhythmic skills for musicians and have developed a flexible and rigorous curriculum designed to provide musicians with broad interests and varied goals the ability to listen, interpret, and improve effectively. Each musician presents a unique set of relationships between his or her brain, body,  instrument, and the concepts of organized sound, the “core skills,” presented by musical systems. These unique relationships must be felt, explored, and understood by individual players in order for basic skills to develop into a flexible and expressive performance practice.

While each musician’s needs are somewhat different, there are ways to develop aural skills which are stimulating for musicians with diverse abilities sharing the same classroom. I work to create a classroom environment that challenges each student to increase their current level of aural skills, whatever their ability. The development of strong aural skills requires an approach that is tactile and progressive, and uses aurally based exercises and continuous feedback to increase students’ awareness of their aural abilities.

Since pitch and rhythm awareness is related to brain and body function, each student will progress at different rates with written theory and aural skills. This potential problem is exacerbated by the fact that notated music, with its left-to-right top-to-bottom hierarchy, presents a format that has been reinforced in students through lifelong classroom practice with math, science, and other subjects. As a result written skills in music theory often  outstrip a student’s current level of aural skill.

This unequal rate of progress requires an aural skills curriculum that is tailored to the actual level of the students in the classroom while still presenting a stimulating and exciting set of tasks. This course includes a large amount of in class performance including hand clapping and other group rhythm exercises, sight singing and singing with drones, in-class student performance of original compositions, improvisation exercises, and interval/chord identification games. There are also online and other computer-based assignments and tools including online quizzes and interval recognition games, as well as an ongoing “goals” aspect of the course designed to help students achieve rewarding careers in music.