Young Musician's Guide To Composing, A

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BOOK CONTENTS (Teacher's Manual):

  • Introduction
  • Unit 1: Musical Symbol Review
  • Unit 1: Supplementary Examples
  • Unit 2: Rhythm Review
  • Unit 2: Supplementary Examples
  • Unit 3: Composition Completion
  • Unit 3: Supplementary Examples
  • Unit 4: Evaluate and Revise
  • Unit 4: Supplementary Examples
  • Unit 5: Major Scales and Key Signatures
  • Unit 5: Supplementary Examples
  • Unit 6: Themes and Variations
  • Unit 7: Melody Shapes

A Young Musician's Guide to Composing is written for students in fifth and sixth grades and is aligned with the National Standards for Music Education. Specifically, this book addresses the following standards:

  • 4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines
  • 5. Reading and notating music
  • 6. Listening to, analyzing and describing music
  • 7. Evaluating music and music performances
  • 8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts

In addition, A Young Musician's Guide to Composing contains the assessment tools you will need to objectively evaluate each student's progress.

The book is divided into seven units which are sequentially organized to help each student master the concepts presented. The teacher's guide includes dozens of reproducible exercises and activities for each of these units which may be used as supplementary, assessment or reinforcement material.

It is vital that each student be able to hear the melody they are working on at any given moment. In a perfect world, each child would have access to their own keyboard equipped with headphones so they could listen, evaluate and revise each composition in "real" time. However (just in case you don't have the luxury of a 35-station keyboard lab yet!), A Young Musician's Guide to Composing is designed to work in almost any situation. All the composition exercises in this book may easily be played on recorder, piano or mallet percussion.