Keyboard Skills for Choral Musicians

Keyboard Skills for Choral MusiciansAt last, a keyboard text for choral musicians! Develop useful playing skills. Get tips on practicing. Learn time tested preparation techniques. Practice material includes hundreds of musical excerpts. Good as a supplemental text for class or to use independently. While this book is planned primarily for choral undergraduate students, users must have basic theory and keyboard skills in hand. Choral musicians who already have experience in the field may

At last, a keyboard text for choral musicians! Develop useful playing skills. Get tips on practicing. Learn time-tested preparation techniques. Practice material includes hundreds of musical excerpts. Good as a supplemental text for class or to use independently.

While this book is planned primarily for choral undergraduate students, users must have basic theory and keyboard skills in hand. Choral musicians who already have experience in the field may also find the text to be useful as a self-help book aimed at bolstering their professional keyboard skills. Although intended to be a basic text, it is nonetheless multifaceted offering glimpses into higher, more sophisticated work that may be achieved in choral performance.

One attribute of this textbook is its flexibility. The design of the chapters is three-part, allowing the user the freedom to move between instructive text, practice scores, and exercises to find what supplements their existing skills. In each chapter, Section A contains instructional text, Section B includes a large amount of high-quality practice material, and Section C provides a series of exercises aimed at developing an ancillary but extremely useful skill set. Numerous threads, such as examining the score and practice ideas, begin in Chapter One and culminate at a more complex level in Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight then relies on this foundation to present a new set of keyboard-related skills that are needed when moving from preparation of small passages to full scores for rehearsal and public performance.

Each chapter begins with an overview of the material contained within it. This is followed by Section A, the central teaching portion. Full paragraphs are followed by bulleted lists, each supplemented with short musical examples. Self-tests are embedded within the text, providing the student with an opportunity to immediately check on their understanding of new ideas. Answers to these are provided in a separate Answer Key found at the end of the book.
Section B contains practice material. Excerpts are drawn mainly from traditional sources supplemented by newer or less well-known material. The generous number of excerpts in each chapter range from about eight to 32 measures in length.
The exercises in Section C provide an introduction to numerous ways of manipulating existing material for practical ends. They are primarily, but not exclusively, aimed at devising accompaniments of a playable level for the individual.