Developing Musicianship through Aural Skills

A Holistic Approach to Sight Singing and Ear Training

Kent D. Cleland, Mary Dobrea-Grindahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429670589
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Developing Musicianship through Aural Skills, Third Edition, is a comprehensive method for learning to hear, sing, understand, and use the foundations of music as part of an integrated curriculum, incorporating both sight singing and ear training in one volume. Under the umbrella of musicianship, this textbook guides students to "hear what they see, and see what they hear, " with a trained, discerning ear on both a musical and an aesthetic level.

Key features of this new edition include:

• Revised selection of musical examples, with added new examples including more excerpts from the literature, more part music, and examples at a wider range of levels, from easy to challenging
• New instructional material on dictation, phrase structure, hearing cadences, and reading lead sheets and Nashville number charts
• An updated website that now includes a comprehensive Teacher's Guide with sample lesson plans, supplemental assignments, and test banks; instructional videos; and enhanced dictation exercises.

The text reinforces both musicianship and theory in a systematic method, and its holistic approach provides students the skills necessary to incorporate professionalism, creativity, confidence, and performance preparation in their music education. Over 1, 600 musical examples represent a wide range of musical styles and genres, including classical, jazz, musical theatre, popular, and folk music. The third edition of Developing Musicianship through Aural Skills provides a strong foundation for undergraduate music students and answers the need for combining skills in a more holistic, integrated music theory core.

Module 1

Simple Meters

Module 1a: Simple Beats and Their First Division and Multiple Note Values

Durational values are indicated using a system of symbols that show the relationships of notes to each other: each note value is equal to one half of the next larger value and twice the next smallest value. As note values get smaller, the system continues indefinitely, with each successively smaller note value adding one flag (or beam). In practice, one rarely sees note values shorter than the sixty-fourth note. The following symbols are the standard note durations:

Simple Beats

The rhythmic structure of most Western music is based on a beat or pulse—a steady, continuous unit of time that occurs at regular intervals. The tempo is the frequency at which we perceive beats to occur.

Beats divide naturally into smaller units, called divisions of the beat. When a beat is divided into two parts, we refer to it as a simple (or binary) beat. Simple beats create a 2:1 relationship between rhythmic values; this is true whether you are dealing with the first division of the beat (twice as fast, or the diminution of the beat) or the first multiple of the beat (twice as slow, or the augmentation ...