Book Description

Fresh on the market, this interactive book helps those musically inclined develop their acumen in sight singing. Organizing each chapter around one musical problem and one rhythmic problem, it contains traditional sight singing materials as well as exercises for composition and analysis, improvisation, and transportation. Beginning with an extensive foreword by an acknowledged expert in the field of music theory pedagogy and aural skills, the book explains how to hear patterns in relation to a tonal center - or, in atonal patterns, how to relate the acquired knowledge from tonal studies to patterns that do not revolve around a tonal center. It presents hundreds of melodies alongside representative works from music literature which are divided in two categories: 1) pedagogically effective tunes that focus on a single problem and include sufficient repetition to insure user mastery, and; 2) melodies spanning the entire range of music literature from the Renaissance to the present day and representing problems in the context of major works of art. It provides warm-up activities that allow users to focus on one problem at a time (i.e., common rhythmic patterns without melodic complications, or pitch patterns without changing rhythms), and offers a variety of ensembles, both newly-composed and from the literature. It also includes an extensive glossary of foreign musical terms and symbols. For musicians, composers, and others in the field of music.