This practical guide treats the mechanics and evolution of the instrument and offers a survey of its literature. The author discusses touch and technique, including articulation and fingering, and the issues involved in historical performance practices. She also provides suggestions on selecting and maintaining a harpsichord.

In recent years, music theory educators around the country have developed new and innovative teaching approaches, reintroducing a sense of purpose into their classrooms. In this book, author and veteran music theory educator Jennifer Snodgrass visits several of these teachers, observing them in their music theory classrooms and providing lesson plans that build upon their approaches. Based on three years of field study spanning seventeen states, coupled with reflections on her own teaching strategies,Teaching Music Theory: New Voices and Approaches highlights real-life teaching approaches from effective (and sometimes award-winning) instructors from a wide range of institutions: high schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and conservatories. Throughout the book, Snodgrass focuses on topics like classroom environment, collaborative learning, undergraduate research and professional development, and curriculum reform. She also emphasizes the importance of a diverse, progressive, and inclusive teaching environment throughout, from encouraging student involvement in curriculum planning to designing lesson plans and assessments so that pedagogical concepts can easily be transferred to the applied studio, performance ensemble, and other courses outside of music. An accessible and valuable text designed with the needs of both students and faculty in mind,Teaching MusicTheoryprovides teachers with a vital set of tools to rejuvenate the classroom and produce confident, empowered students.

Originally published in 1867, this book is a collection of songs of African-American slaves. A few of the songs were written after the emancipation, but all were inspired by slavery. The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull, daily misery, which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in the life after, to which their eyes seem constantly turned.

(Amadeus). Score reading provides insights into the musical structure of a work that are difficult to obtain from merely listening. Many listeners and amateurs derive great pleasure from following a performance with score in hand to help them better understand the intricacies of what they are hearing. This guide includes practice examples of increasing difficulty taken from scores of well-known works from various periods.

Prosody as a system of suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects: First, prosody is concerned with acoustic correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with each other by their physical properties such as duration and pitch. Second, prosodic accounts suggest a hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to syntax. Third, prosody provides a very promising ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music. Fourth, bilateral transfer effects between language and music are best illustrated on the level of prosody. Highlighting the first two aspects, this book shows that it is a fruitful endeavor to use prosody for a principled comparison of language and music. In its broader sense, prosody as sound structure of communicative systems may be considered a "meta"-language that formalizes the way of "how music speaks to language and vice versa". Prosody is firmly established within linguistic theory, but is also applied in the musical domain. Therefore, prosody is not just a field of inquiry that shares elements or features between music and language, but can additionally provide a common conceptual ground.

At a time of unprecedented interest in improvisation across the arts, The Art of Becoming boldly asserts that everyone can and should improvise. Drawing on emerging psychological literature as well as their own research with musicians, authors Raymond MacDonald and Graeme Wilson - both music psychologists and renowned performers in their own right - propose new ideas on what defines improvisation in music. MacDonald and Wilson explore the cognitive processes involved, the role of specialist skills or knowledge in improvised interaction, and the nature of understanding between improvisers. Their investigation lays out how we develop as improvisers, alongside health benefits derived from music participation. The Art of Becoming is a vital resource for courses on improvisation in contemporary practice, and for those applying musical improvisation in community and therapeutic contexts, setting out a framework based on psychological findings for understanding improvisation as a universal capability and an essentially social behavior. With suggestions for approaching this practice in new ways at any level, it demonstrates how improvisation transcends musical genres and facilitates collaboration between practitioners from disciplines across the artistic spectrum. Putting forward important implications for contemporary artistic practices, pedagogy, music therapy and the psychology of social behavior, The Art of Becoming provides fresh and provocative insights for anyone interested in playing, studying, teaching, or listening to improvised music.

In music, students are often force-fed scales, without ever really being told why these scales are important. By the end of this book you'll understand not only the relation between scales and chords, but also other basics that will get you understanding and playing music better. For all levels of musicians, and all instruments

Sound Innovations for Concert Band, Book 2 continues your student's musical journey by teaching with segmented presentation of new concepts and introducing ensemble playing. Isolating concepts and teaching them individually helps facilitate understanding of the more advanced material. Following the unique Sound Innovations organization, the book contains four levels, each of which is divided into several sections that introduces concepts separately and provides plenty of practice and performance opportunities to reinforce each lesson. Visit www.alfred.com/soundinnovations for more information.
"Sound Innovations by Alfred Music is a dream-come-true method for beginning concert band and string orchestra. Its infusion of technology provides an open-ended architecture of the first order. This unique blend of time-tested strategies and technology offer a great foundation for a successful learning experience."
---John Kuzmich, Jr., BandDirector.com This title is available in SmartMusic.

This immensely practical handbook is designed to provide both the student and teacher of the horn the tools needed to achieve excellence in all areas of horn playing. The work of a musician, composer, and teacher at Rochester, New York's Eastman School of Music, it is the first book to cover the topic, presenting a broad introduction to horn study, practice, and performance. The book confronts the problems faced by horn players from their early instruction to the beginning of their professional careers. The author emphasizes the development of a broad musicianship through ear-training, score study, and the investigation of music beyond the horn literature. Leading the player and teacher through the etude, solo, chamber music, and orchestral literature of the horn, the book also provides examples of exercises for warm-up and for perfecting technique.

A biography of the conductor Mitropoulos. He was an advocate of difficult modern music and an early champion of Mahler; his performances brought the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra into the first rank of American orchestras.