Review of Jane Piper Clendinning and Elizabeth West Marvin, The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis (W.W. Norton, 2005)

Abstract

1] Jane Piper Clendinning and Elizabeth West Marvin's combined knowledge and experience in the areas of music analysis, music theory pedagogy, and service to our discipline is noteworthy.When these two respected scholars and teachers joined forces to create The Musician's Guide series of music theory, aural skills, and fundamentals texts with Joel Phillips, the result was bound to be significant.This review focuses on Clendinning and Marvin's The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis with supporting workbook, anthology, and compact discs.[2] The first thing one notices upon receiving this text is the abundance of supporting materials.Clendinning and Marvin support the musical examples and concepts in their text with compact disc recordings of the excerpts and an anthology with complete movements and works.Gone for the instructor who adopts their text is the task of hunting for complete scores and recordings to accompany the few measures from each composition that usually exist in the body of a textbook, or fumbling with the CD player in front of one's class to find the relevant few measures in recordings of complete works.[3] When planning their music theory text, the authors clearly considered the diverse experiences of the first-semester freshman class.The text contains one hundred thirty-two pages of fundamentals material in Part I, Building a Musical Vocabulary: Basic Elements of Pitch and Rhythm.The authors take a spiral approach.Chapter two focuses only on simple meters and chapter three only on major keys.Chapter four returns to meters, this time compound, and chapter five returns to key signatures, now adding parallel and relative minor keys and modes.Pitches and pitch classes are the focus of the opening chapter, and, in chapter six, the authors develop this concept further with a discussion of pitch intervals.Part I concludes with triads and seventh chords.One of the striking features of this opening section is its focus on measures 1-5a of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, second movement.While seeing the opening page of this score on page three of the text may at first be daunting to students, the subsequent unpacking of the concepts required to read the score provides a sense of accomplishment when the example appears again on page sixty-one.Now, the students who have been exposed to the basics of pitch and rhythm notation, simple meters, and major and minor keys have a clearer understanding of the musical notational system used in the score.[4] Another issue that the authors address in their text is the presentation of material in a manner that draws students to key concepts and terms.Each chapter title page contains an outline of topics covered, an overview, and a list of repertoire.Clendinning and Marvin place "Key Concepts" in bold blue-colored boxes throughout the text.They place "Terms You

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