Listen and Sing: Lessons in Ear-Training and Sight-Singing

Rating:
Summary: Innovative Ear-training
Review: Listen and Sing offers creative exercises to rehearse familiar problems in ear-training for undergraduate core theory courses. The text contains graded musical examples for sight-singing and dictation from historically important common practice repertoire. Thoughtfully designed prepartory exercises, like the Arpeggiation Workshops, lead students step by step to successful dictation skills. Musical complexities are introduced gradually: more unusual keys, difficult rhythmic combinations, and expanded harmonic progressions are meticulously graded and placed throughout the text. The Pedagogy of Listen and Sing is strongly innovative, detailed in its conception, and at may require extra preparation on the part of the instructor.

Rating:
Summary: Innovative Ear-training
Review: Listen and Sing offers creative exercises to rehearse familiar problems in ear-training for undergraduate core theory courses. The text contains graded musical examples for sight-singing and dictation from historically important common practice repertoire. Thoughtfully designed prepartory exercises, like the Arpeggiation Workshops, lead students step by step to successful dictation skills. Musical complexities are introduced gradually: more unusual keys, difficult rhythmic combinations, and expanded harmonic progressions are meticulously graded and placed throughout the text. The Pedagogy of Listen and Sing is strongly innovative, detailed in its conception, and at may require extra preparation on the part of the instructor.

Rating:
Summary: great book, but the tapes sometimes do more harm than good
Review: The book itself is a great learning tool. Not fun, but it gets results. The four tapes, however, while harmonically and melodically accurate, seem to be missing something incredibly important: rhythm. The played examples are characterized by a rhythmic ambiguity that adds nothing but frustration to the experience. Dictation requires accuracy, and in a rhythmic sense there is very little of that here.

Rating:
Summary: A solid program to develop important musical skills
Review: There are a number of approaches to what is called ear training. Obviously, it is the mind that is trained rather than the ear, but it is called ear training because the aspect of the mind that is being made more acute is the sense of hearing. One of the reasons the most successful methods of ear training use singing is because of way singing connects the passive mode of hearing to an active mode of listening and discrimination; of hearing clearly so one can replicate the sounds heard. The act of notating what one hears is called musical dictation and is a desirable skill in developing musical literacy.

This book, "Listen and Sing", by David Damschroder, is quite good in laying out a program to develop those skills. It begins at a very basic level with simple melodies to sing alone and with fellow students. I like the way Prof. Damschroder emphasizes rhythm as well as pitch and provides many different kinds of exercises to simultaneously develop the ability to hear melodies, repeat them, sing them at sight from notation, look at notation and match what you see with what you hear, linking aspects of functional harmony with the melodic structure, and writing down what you hear.

The book carefully begins with very basic skills, and logically adds complexity so that the skill development seems natural and without a steep learning curve. However, the student must actually practice the exercises in each chapter or they will soon find the demands being added too difficult to fake their way through (unless the student has these skills already - and if so - why are they reading this book or taking the course? Pass out of it already!).

I think the accompanying tapes are a good investment and will aid student practice a great deal. The tapes are a separate purchase and are ISB 0-02-870666-8. The DVDs are not available.

Rating:
Summary: A solid program to develop important musical skills
Review: There are a number of approaches to what is called ear training. Obviously, it is the mind that is trained rather than the ear, but it is called ear training because the aspect of the mind that is being made more acute is the sense of hearing. One of the reasons the most successful methods of ear training use singing is because of way singing connects the passive mode of hearing to an active mode of listening and discrimination; of hearing clearly so one can replicate the sounds heard. The act of notating what one hears is called musical dictation and is a desirable skill in developing musical literacy.

This book, "Listen and Sing", by David Damschroder, is quite good in laying out a program to develop those skills. It begins at a very basic level with simple melodies to sing alone and with fellow students. I like the way Prof. Damschroder emphasizes rhythm as well as pitch and provides many different kinds of exercises to simultaneously develop the ability to hear melodies, repeat them, sing them at sight from notation, look at notation and match what you see with what you hear, linking aspects of functional harmony with the melodic structure, and writing down what you hear.

The book carefully begins with very basic skills, and logically adds complexity so that the skill development seems natural and without a steep learning curve. However, the student must actually practice the exercises in each chapter or they will soon find the demands being added too difficult to fake their way through (unless the student has these skills already - and if so - why are they reading this book or taking the course? Pass out of it already!).

I think the accompanying tapes are a good investment and will aid student practice a great deal. The tapes are a separate purchase and are ISB 0-02-870666-8. The DVDs are not available.

Rating:
Summary: Listen and Scream
Review: This book is a debacle. Take any first or second year college ear training class which uses this book and you will see why.