Level 3 · Course 48

Harmonic Dictation Methodology

The methodological companion to the /releve tool — bass first, functions before chords, inversions by ear, the discipline of the 6 listenings. Last course of the DNSPM track and of the catalogue.

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Pause Culture · Harmonic dictation — hear to write, write to hear

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979)

Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) trained generations of composers in Paris and at Fontainebleau — Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, Quincy Jones. Her discipline was relentle…

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À retenir : The ear is built like an instrumental technique: the bass sung in scale degrees, formulas recognised as blocks, one listening = one goal. Harmonic dictation is not a test of talent — it is a protocol.

Here, the synthesised piano is an asset, not a limitation. Course 45 (listening commentary) had to admit that the lack of a recording library ruled out any work on timbre and orchestration. For harmonic dictation it is the opposite: the exam consists of transcribing pitches and chords exactly, and a synthesised piano is precisely the ideal instrument for that — perfect intonation, identical notes on every replay, steady tempo, no reverberation masking the bass. It is at the piano, in fact, that most aural-training teachers work on harmonic dictation. Everything the exam demands — hearing a bass, figures, four voices — can be trained entirely in /releve. The only thing the tool does not train is timbre recognition: that is the business of the listening commentary (course 45), not of dictation.

What is the relevé (harmonic dictation)?

The relevé — harmonic dictation — is the king of exercises in advanced aural training: a musical fragment is played a limited number of times, and you must transcribe it exactly — the bass, the chords, sometimes all four voices. It appears in the entrance exams of the French Pôles supérieurs and the CNSM, and throughout advanced musicianship and writing curricula. Where the listening commentary (course 45) asks you to describe, identify and situate — an argued discourse about what you hear —, dictation asks you to write down, note by note: no stylistic approximation makes up for a wrong chord. And where chord dictation trains you to recognise isolated chords (one label per chord, out of context), the relevé deals with a syntactic progression: chords follow one another according to a grammar, and that grammar is your best ally — a guessed chord is checked against its neighbours.

What dictation really trains goes beyond the exam: harmonic memory (holding a whole progression between two listenings), the inner ear — what English-language pedagogy calls audiation: mentally hearing music that is not sounding —, and the reflex of hearing music in functions and in voices, not as a mass of sound. It is the very skill of written harmony (courses 26 and 42), taken in the other direction.

The key, then the cadence, then the bass, then the figures. Never transcribe an isolated chord « in the middle »: first set the frame (key, final cadence), then the skeleton (the bass in degrees), and the figures settle onto it. Starting with the detail is the most costly methodological mistake.

♪ Course 45 — Listening commentary methodology

The sister discipline: describing and situating what you hear. Dictation, for its part, writes it down — the two exams complete each other.

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