Playing With Motives - Aural Skills Exercises for Tonal Structure

Abstract

David Castro presents in his "Playing With Motives: Aural Skills Exercises for Tonal Structure" "a type of musical comprehension that is the goal of dictation exercises, [one that] depends entirely on the cognitive systems that are available to students in order for them to make sense of what they are hearing... It is just this sort of meaning that the discipline of music theory engages and it is this sort of meaning that we want our students to learn... The primary purpose of this article is to present a few aural skills exercises that focus directly on students' schematic familiarity with the diatonic scale, enabling them to recognize and/or reproduce scale degrees quickly and accurately."