Ear Training for Twentieth-Century Music
Michael L. Friedmann
Yale University Press
How can the musician’s ear penetrate the complexities and theoretical abstractions of the twentieth-century music? This book offers a solution: it enables the student to perceive essential musical connections at the core of modern music by identifying and drilling the distinctive structures and processes of the twentieth century’s greatest composers. <br /> <br />Michael L. Friedmann has developed and successfully tested a method that combines theory and exercises to give students a deeper understanding of modern music. Using musical examples from the works of Debussy, Bartók, Choenberg, and Stravinsky, Friedmann begins with extensive work in sight-singing and dictation.  The chapters that follow develop clear, multifaceted approaches to intervals and dyads, transposition and inversion, melodic contour, and three-and four-element set classes.  In these chapters Friedmann offers students opportunities not just to identify the twelve trichord and twenty-nine tetrachord types, but to explore their structural possibilities. He also demonstrates the relation of these set classes to the diatonic, whole-tone, and octatonic scales.  Finally, Friedmann introduces set classes of more than four elements, as well as twentieth-century modes. The book provides a wealth of musical excerpts including melodies composed by the author himself—to test analytic listening ability and to make the student with each set class.  <br /><br /><br /> 