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.

1 comments:
I have the Spencer, and need to use it more. For a quick guide to form, Spencer and Temko's book is solid as well; it's a great reference.
I would add to the Desert Island Set the old standby: the 371 Bach Chorales.
In addition, I'd throw in Al Blatter's Instrumentation and Orchestration as a reference guide for transposition and arranging. I recommend all my students - not just the composers - have a copy. I like the fact that he uses examples from wind literature as well.
WF
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