I found myself walking past a music store yesterday and came home with the book Materials of Western Music, W. Andrews, M. Sclater. I really love the approach which I haven't seen before and thought I should mention it. Apologies if it is already well known which it might well be.

Tell us more about this book. I have not heard of it before.

Hm, this is harder than I thought:It discusses the things we see in rudiments and harmony, but there is a different angle from what I have seen. For example, my regular harmony book (Sarnecki) will introduce cadences, and you do exercises writing them. Then you do analysis of a musical passage, and you find the cadences and voice leading etc. It's dry theory even in the music excerpts.

You need to know basic theory, have basic keyboard skills since you're expected to play the examples, and hopefully sing the melodic lines to hear them.

This book takes the perspective of how it works in sound and in music, sort of putting that first. Let's see. The first chapter is called "The sounds essential to harmony" and it discusses tonality, the tetrachord characteristic of major scales, intervals (calling them colours), chords, and tritones. When it discusses tonality, there are three musical examples which you are to play, so that you can hear what is meant. I find this different and important. The excerpts are from a Bach fugue, Beethoven & Mozart sonatas, and a string quartet score from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. You are to play and listen for tonality.

The section on tritones blew me away. I knew that in harmony you expand an aug4 and shrink a dim5 but didn't catch on why. There is a subdominant wanting to move to the mediant, and a leading note wanting to move to the tonic - how else can it move? Instead of having a "rule" it makes sense in music and in sound.

That's not the part that blew me away, however. They showed 6 tritones, rising from a base note C to base note F saying "There are only six tritones. Others are enharmonic equivalents to these." Only six? Well, since an inverted tritone is still a tritone, that makes sense. I think I played with that for 15 minutes. It was so simple and clear. You can get any tritone of any key. And it was all on half a page.

It seems more compact and more real. For all I know, there may be many books of this kind. It was stuck between the theory books and the music history books as though they didn't know where to put it. There are things about harmony, about rudiments, about musical form. Some of the time you're asked to write, and others it will say "improvise". The book's dimensions are a bit larger than a sheet of paper, and it is 350 pages.

I didn't explain this well at all.

I have this book. It's sitting on my bookshelf for the future. Why? Because it's more for late intermediate or early advanced players. It's not an easy book to work though.