I looking at all of the textbooks I have in my office the other day and thinking about which ones I actually use in my day-to-day teaching. I have quite a few textbooks because of my theory pedagogy class: I used to have them review textbooks, but I've dropped that this semester for several reasons.
One of the things I always tell my pedagogy students is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are many good textbooks out there with many good exercises in them.
At any rate, if I could only choose a handful of these to have at the ready (aside from the textbook we require the students to buy), these would be the chosen ones:
One of the things I always tell my pedagogy students is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are many good textbooks out there with many good exercises in them.
At any rate, if I could only choose a handful of these to have at the ready (aside from the textbook we require the students to buy), these would be the chosen ones:
- Peter Spencer, The practice of harmony. I use the exercises in this book for quizzes, in-class work, and drill exercises (70 key signatures in five minutes--GO!).
- Horvit, Koozin, and Nelson, Music for ear training (Instructor's manual). I use this book as a compendium of melodic and harmonic dictation exercises.
- Charles Burkhart, Anthology for musical analysis. Includes complete scores of a variety of works from all historical periods, each prefaced by some good, thought-provoking questions. Very well indexed, too--you can find pieces that are in simple binary form, or that contain I6 chords.
- Benjamin, Horvit, and Nelson. Music for analysis. Includes musical excerpts, most of which appear in piano reduction. In contrast to the Burkhart, it's arranged by theory topic, not historical period. If I need a bunch of examples of German augmented sixth chords (as I did earlier this week) this is where I turn.
- Roger Kamien, Music: An appreciation (4-CD set). Having taught music appreciation from this book for many years, I'm well acquainted with the selections on the CD set. Chances are if you need a quick audio example of any theoretical concept, you can find it on one of these CDs. Each piece is also broken down into multiple tracks so that you don't have to fast-forward through six minutes of Mozart's 40th symphony to get to the recapitulation.