Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #612888 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Plastic Comb
• 309 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent text for really learning to sight-sing
I teach sight-singing and ear-training to enthusiastic community singers, and this is the best book I've found. Many other texts have occasional helpful bits. With this text, my students can start at the beginning and work through to the end, in the process both learning and cementing a skill that will stay with them for life. For any community or church chorus working to improve the sight-singing of their group, this is THE book to buy.

Not great for going it alone
If you want to learn sight singing on your own this is not going to be of great help. This is possibly a good text for the classroom when you are guided by someone very familiar with the subject but it is not ideal for home study. Look at the contents and you will see that this is in fact organised as a reference book as opposed to a step by step approach to conquering the subject.

If you want to sight sing then you are probably already an amateur singer of some description who would like to have this valuable skill. So you are starting with some basic music sense: a sense of key, familiarity with scales and melody. The book doesn't build on that. It starts by asking the student to sing the whole tone scale which is extremely difficult for those of us familiar with the major and minor scales... it's not intuitive and is effectively a chromatic alteration of what you've been using for years. This creates a huge stumbling block as the starting point.

Perhaps, as another reviewer comments, this is a good approach if you will spend most of your time dealing with atonal music. However most singers, from choral to karaoke, largely sing tonal music.

What I like about this book is that there are many music extracts to practice on and it's not hard bound so you can use it at the piano with ease. I therefore use this as a reference and exercise book but not as the basis of a systematic approach to sight singing.

Sight singing for the real world
OK so we've all had plenty of books that start out sight singing based on a single scale, say the major scale. And you sing through about 100 exercises thereby learn all 12 kinds of intervals. Then they add non-harmonic tones and eventuall you get into a little chromaticism and modulation. However, modern composers do not limit themselves to such simple melodies.

How about a book that instead teaches you to hear 2nds, 5ths, 4ths, 3rds, and so on. Isn't that what its all about? Whenever you see a P4, sing a P4. You don't even need to keep track of scale degrees or worry about if you'll sing "re", "ri" or "icky-zipang". Adler, who is prof. emeritus at Eastman, starts off with exercises that teach you to sing a single interval, for example major 2nds. After you sing, slowly and carefully, through his exercises you will never confuse a M2 with a m2 or m3 again. Likewise through all the other intervals. Of course he includes plenty of melodies from the literature.

Furthermore, there is an entire section dedicated to the study of rhythm without involving pitch. This is typically the weakest area for most music students.

And now that the 2nd edition is spiral bound (what were they thinking w/ ed. #1?) there is no reason not to buy this book.

Sincerely, Salvador T. Pimienta