The Musician?s Guide to Aural Skills, Second Edition, vol. 1: Sight-Singing, Rhythm-Reading, Improvisation, and Keyboard Skills

The Musician's Guide to Aural Skills integrates all critical aural skills in a single teaching and learning program coordinated (chapter by chapter) with a companion text in theory and analysis. The two volumes, organized by skill type, contain a wide range of exercises and a diverse repertoire of real music-classical, popular song, film and TV themes, folk songs. There is absolutely no need for supplementary materials, and students are involved in creative music-making from the very beginning.

Volume 1, Sight-Singing, Rhythm-Reading, Improvisation, and Keyboard Skills, includes:
-800+ sight-singing melodies: preparatory exercises, author-composed études, tunes from the literature, as well as melodies for two, three, or four parts.
-600+ rhythms: preparatory patterns as well as graded rhythms for solo, due, and trio.
-Guided individual and group improvisation: opportunities for on-the-spot music making.
-Progressive keyboard exercises: reinforcing all essential musical concepts at the keyboard with hands-on practice.

CONTENIDO:

I. Elements of music
Sight-Singing:
A. Major keys, simple meters
B. Major and minor keys, simple and compound meters
C. Major and minor keys, simple and compound meters, beat subdivisions
D. Modal melodies
Rhythm-Reading:
A. Simple meters
B. Compound meters
C. Simple meters with beat subdivisions
D. Compound meters with beat subdivisions
E. Borrowed beat divisions ("Tuplets")

II. Diatonic harmony and tonicization
Sight-Singing
A. Phrases
B. Embellishing phrases
C. Phrase organization
D. Tonicization
Rhythm-Reading
A. Simple meters
B. Compound meters
C. Compound (Super) triplets
D. Compound (Super) duplets
E. Hemiola
F. Combined beat divisions (3:2 and 2:3) in simple meters
G. Combined beat divisions (3:2 and 2:3) in compound meters

III. Chromatic harmony and form
Sight-Singing
A. Tonicizations, modulations, and small forms
B. More contrapuntal music, modal mixture, and the N6 and A6 chords
C. New vocal forms and more chromatic harmonies
D. Variations, rondo, and sonata forms
Rhythm-Readiing
A. Changing meters
B. Super-subdivided beats in slow tempos
C. More syncopation: ragtime and jazz
D. Asymmetric meters
E. Combined beat divisions

IV. The Twentieth Century and beyond
Sight-Singing
A. Modal and pentatonic melodies revisited
B. Precursors to atonal music: collections and sets
C. Ordered collections and twelve-tone music
D. More rhythmic challenges
Rhythm-Reading:
A. Quintuplets and septuplets
B. More asymmetric meters
C. Characteristic dance rhythms
D. Rhythms of the spoken word
E. Tempo and meter modulation
F. Twentieth-Century concepts and literature

Improvisation
1. Improvisation with rhythm cells
2. Major and minor triads
3. Major and minor-keys melodies
4. Major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, and modal melodies
5. Seventh chords (Mm7, MM7, mm7)
6. First-species counterpoint
7. Second-species counterpoint
8. Embellishing melodic outlines
9. Improvising melodies in phrase pairs
10. Improvising over figured basses and roman numeral progressions
11. Conclusive and inconclusive phrases
12. Improvising with predominant chords
13. Improvising periods
14. Improvising sequences
15. Phase expansion, asymmetrical meter, and tonicization
16. Modulatory periods
17. Mixture, phrase expansion, A6 and N6 chords
18. Blues and rock
19. Ragtime
20. Continuous variations
21. Modes and scales
22. Whole-tone and pentatonic scales
23. Octatonic scales and subsets
24. Twelve-tone dance
25. Polymetric duets

Keyboard skills
1. Major pentachords, tetrachords, and scales
2. Minor pentachords, tetrachords, and scales
3. Diatonic modes
4. Intervals
5. Triads
6. Seventh chords
7. Counterpoint
8. The basic phrase: tonic- and dominant-function chords
9. Adding predominant chords to the basic phrase
10. Dominant-function seventh chords
11. More dominant-tonic (D-T) progressions
12. Predominant expansion of the tonic
13. Deceptive and phrygian resolutions
14. Delayed resolutions
15. Sequences
16. Secondary-dominant-function chords
17. Common modulations
18, Modal mixtue
19. Blues and popular-music harmony
20. Other chromatic harmony
21. Unordered pitch-class sets

Credits
Index of music examples