A guide to how you can use class materials (examples drawn from the key AoSs) to hone your skills and understanding

SING and PLAY

You will be pleasantly surprised at how swiftly engaging with plenty of sing-and-play tasks improves your aural skills as well as your fundamental understanding of how parts within music (harmony/counterpoint/texture) work.

This will have positive impact on your performance skills, listening and analysis and on your compositional understanding.

Mich 1:

Things you could work on:

• Any of the melodies from the sheet called Chapter 1
• Any of the 1st Species exercises
• Any of the dictation patterns (mostly thirds) covered in the past two weeks
• The primary triads for example:
  • play the outer two notes and sing the middle?
  • play the root of the chord and sing the other two as an arpeggio?
  • Sing the root, then play the associated substitution chord
• A scale in 3rds (sing m-m' or play then sing the third in solfa, in letter names, as an interval label)

Using a standard as a starting point:

Use Autumn Leaves as a starting point to take an in-depth look at scales and modes.

Fundamental work

Use g minor as an example. Write out the diatonic minor chords and sing through them chords whilst looking at them written out on the staff.

Sing through the primary chords in the minor key

Other related musicianship practice

• Can you sing through all the modes?
• Can you sing modes with letter names?
• Consider the placement and pattern of semi-tones within the minor scale.
• Consider the Blues scale. Can you sing it in solfa (what solfa works best?)
• What implications might the blues scale have when extending chords to use 7ths ?