Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the INTRODUCTORY REMARKS:
EVERY musician who has had classes in harmony under his charge has, no doubt, made the experience that students, when even endowed with only an average degree of talent and application, can be taught to harmonize with a good deal of correctness either a given bass or a melody; making, at the right places, use of modulations, suspensions, passing notes, etc. Nay, some even will become able to master with a certain facility the different species of simple counterpoint in two, three and four parts. But in all these tasks they can hang on the leading strings of certain fixed rules.
The case becomes, however, quite different when those leading strings are loosened, and students thrown on their own resources, that is, obliged to invent a melody with a suitable harmony.
Although most of them may have acquired facility in working out their examples in harmony away from the pianoforte, they now, in order to find a simple melodic motive, become the slaves of the keyboard; and it also causes them the greatest trouble to write down correctly the melody they have picked out on the keyboard. But the trouble increases when such a melody has to be provided with a suitable natural harmony. All that they had previously learned about harmony seems to desert them now at once: they find themselves utterly at sea.
I have almost invariably found that even able pianoforte or vocal students, well-grounded in the rudiments of music, when asked to write down from memory the melodic passage of the first bar only of the simple piece or song they have just been playing or singing for me correctly by heart, can absolutely not do it: to fix the respective pitch of the different notes of the melodic passage, and especially the division of time, presents unsurmountable obstacles to them.
Having had ample opportunity to make the closest observations regarding all those shortcomings on the part of musical students, and being desirous to help in removing them, I have concluded, after practically testing its usefulness, to work out this method of musical dictation. I became convinced that in order to strengthen the musical memory in the right direction, and teach students to think musically, they ought to possess the faculty of writing down correctly all they are able to play or sing correctly by heart; and this faculty can be acquired by means of musical dictation; in this way the musical sense becomes sharpened, the more delicate shades of time, rhythm, the cut of the melodic motive and its expansion into phrases and periods will be impressed upon the mind more vividly and more distinctly. The melody, which now lingers in the mind like an indistinct shadow of divers sounds, will by means of this method, when well mastered, take definite shape, and at the desire of the musical student can be fixed upon paper in visible characters....
