How to learn intervals? Musical hits to the rescue!
The ability to determine intervals by ear is an important quality that is valuable both in itself and as an integral part of other skills.
For example, a child who can identify any interval by ear copes much better with dictations in solfeggio lessons.
This skill seems to many students to be a terrible, difficult duty with which strict theoretic teachers torture children. Meanwhile, not everyone can easily and immediately distinguish a fourth from a fifth, or a major sixth from a minor, using the natural apparatus – hearing.
But not being able to crack intervals like nuts doesn’t mean you’re doomed. If it is impossible to use your hearing, let your memory help!
How to remember intervals?
This technique is successfully used by many experienced teachers, whose hopes for the student’s natural talents have not been justified, and the performance and effectiveness of the educational process cannot remain as is.
So how can you take an interval top without completely trusting your own ears? Here’s how: listen to music! Not just any one, not everything, and not your favorite band. There is a certain set of songs that you yourself can supplement if you understand this topic well.
Such songs begin at a specific interval. For example, the notorious one begins with a big sixth. And if you remember this, then the big sixth will cease to be a mystery to you forever. And the renowned favorite of music lovers and romantics, “Love Story,” begins with a minor sixth, although, unlike “Yolochka,” it is descending, not ascending. (In an ascending interval, the first sound is lower than the second). Moreover, this whole love melody is a living advertisement for the minor sixth!
Interval Cheat Sheet!
Of course, you say, there are pitfalls here too! Of course, not everyone will succeed even in this way, but the first uncertainty will be destroyed by the first success.
If you hear interval, then concentrate and imagine which of the songs listed below you could finish singing after it. After some time of such classes, the beginning of the Russian anthem will already firmly enter your consciousness as a perfect fourth, and the dear Cheburashka song will be associated with a small second.
| Interval | Ascendant: | Descending: |
| h 1 | “Jingle Bells” “Song of Friends” (“There is nothing better in the world…”). | |
| m 2 | “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (Les Parapluies De Cherbourg), “Song of the Crocodile Gena” (“Let them run…”), “I was once strange, a nameless toy”, “Let there always be sunshine!” | “Fur Elise”, Carmen’s aria (“Love, like a bird, has wings”), “Song of the Robbers” (“They say we are buki-buki…”) |
| b 2 | “Evening Bells”, “If I went out on a journey with a friend”, “I remember a wonderful moment” | “Antoshka”, “Yesterday”. |
| m 3 | “Evenings near Moscow”, “Tell me, Snow Maiden, where you have been”, “Farewell song” (“Let’s quietly…” film “An Ordinary Miracle”), “Chunga-Changa”. | “The little Christmas tree is cold in winter,” “Tired toys are sleeping.” |
| b 3 | “Mountain Peaks” (version by Anton Rubinstein). | “Chizhik-Pyzhik”. |
| h 4 | Anthem of Russia, “Blue Car”, “Moments” (from the film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”), “A Young Cossack Walks Along the Don”, “Song of a Brilliant Detective”. | “There was a grasshopper sitting in the grass”, “Daddy can” (beginning of the chorus), “Blue Car” (beginning of the chorus). |
| h 5 | “Mom” (“Mom is the first word…”). | “True Friend” (“Strong Friendship…”), “Vologda”. |
| m 6 | “Coachman, don’t drive the horses” (beginning of chorus), “Under the blue sky”, “Beautiful is far away” (beginning of chorus). | “Love Story”, “Once upon a time there was a black cat around the corner”, “I ask…” (“Song of a Distant Homeland”, film “Seventeen Moments of Spring”). |
| b 6 | “A Christmas tree was born in the forest,” “You know, it will still be!” | “The clock is striking on the old tower” |
| m 7 | “To share” | “The frost was wrapped in snow” (End of the chorus “A Christmas tree was born in the forest”) |
| b 7 | ———– | ———– |
| h 8 | “Turn” (group “Time Machine”), “Where the Motherland Begins,” “Like Life Without Spring” (film “Midshipmen, Forward!”) | |
As you can see, popular music has bypassed in its love the most harsh and unpleasant interval – septim. And if M7 was lucky with “La cumparsita” and a fragment of “Little Christmas Tree,” then her big sister got melodies that are not “heard of.” However, she still cannot hide from your attentive ears. If you hear something very unpleasant sounding between “La cumparsita” and the Time Machine hit “Turn”, then it is a major seventh.
This method has been tested by theorists on the most “hopeless” students. He supports the old truth: there are no untalented people, only lack of effort and laziness.
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