• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 901 0

form - may also be called sonata-allegro or first-movement form. It is in fact often found in the first movement of a sonata, but it has been an extremely popular form with many well-known composers, and so can be found anywhere from the first movement of a quartet to the final movement of a symphony. In this relatively complex form (too complex to outline here), repetition and development of melodic themes within a framework of expected key changes allow the composer to create a long movement that is unified enough that it makes sense to the listener, but varied enough that it does not get boring.

Note

Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey! It was very useful to me, both as a researcher and as an author, to get a better picture of my readers' goals and needs. I hope to begin updating the survey results module in April. I will also soon begin making some of the suggested additions, and emailed comments are still welcome as always.

Solutions to Exercises

Solution to Exercise 5.7.1. (Return to Exercise)

Your answers will depend on the songs you choose. Check them with a teacher if you can. (Bring the music so the teacher can listen to it while checking your answers.)

Solution to Exercise 5.7.2. (Return to Exercise)

If one is available, have a music teacher check your answers.

Chapter 6. Challenges

6.1. Ear Training*

What is Ear Training?

When musicians talk about ear, they don't mean the sense organ itself so much as the brain's ability to perceive, distinguish, and understand what the ear has heard. The term ear training refers to teaching musicians to recognize information about notes and chords just by hearing them.

A few people have what is called perfect pitch or absolute pitch. These people, when they hear music, can tell you exactly what they are hearing: the G above middle C, for example, or the first inversion of an F minor chord. A few musicians with particularly perceptive ears can even tell you that a piano is tuned a few cents higher than the one that they play at home. This is an unusual skill that even most trained musicians do not have, and research seems to suggest that if you don't have it at a very early age, you cannot develop it. (For more on this subject, you may want to look up Robert Jourdain's Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination.)

However, most musicians can be trained to recognize relative pitch. In other words, if you play two notes, they can tell you that one of them is a major third higher than the other. If you play four chords in a row, they can tell you that you played a tonic-subdominant-dominant seventh-tonic (I-IV-V7-I) chord progression.

Fortunately, having relative pitch is good enough, and for many musicians may even be more useful than perfect pitch, because of the way Western music is conceived. Since all major keys are so similar, a piece in a major key will sound almost exactly the same whether you play it in C major or D major. The thing that matters is not what note you start on, but how all the notes are related to each other and to the "home" note (the tonic) of the key. If someone really wants the piece to be in a different key (because it's easier to sing or play in that key, or just because they want it to sound higher or lower), the whole thing can be transposed, but the only difference that would make (in the sound) is that the entire piece will sound higher or lower. Most listeners would not even notice the difference, unless you played it in both keys, one right after the other.

Note

All minor keys are also heard by most listeners as interchangeable, but there are important differences between major keys and minor keys. In fact, the differences in sound between a major key and a minor key is one of the first differences that a musician should be able to hear. If you would like to see whether your "ear" can recognize the difference between major and minor keys, please try the listening exercise in Major Keys and Scales.

So, you often don't need to know exactly what notes or chords are