Friday, September 20, 2013

The Wedge Experiment 1 Month In

After choking on the price of the ear-training textbook I'd used for decades - it's ridiculous to expect music students to spend c. $80 on a beginning ear training textbook - I decided to look for a public domain alternative.  I settled on an old textbook, Sight Singing and Ear Training  by George A. Wedge and am delighted with the results after a month.   It's not even necessary to print it out on paper so it's essentially free.  A lot of his exercises, especially in the beginning with hearing octaves are vitally important and entirely neglected in modern text books. 

All ear-training books have their limits but going through just about any of them will move you on.  I will probably use Wedge's Advanced Ear-Training for students who get through the first book.  It would be a good idea to supplement the major-minor oriented exercises with reading modal melodies and those are available for free as well.   

If you went through all of those, learning to sing them on the extended version of fixed-do, using a keyboard or guitar as necessary (keeping in mind that a guitar plays an octave below written pitch) you would be entirely ready to take on any beginning counterpoint or harmony textbook.  And the price of harmony textbooks!  And my favorite one,  Sessions's Harmonic Practice, has been out of print for ages.   I'll be looking at pdfs of old ones as well. 


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