Regarding Grade 5 Theory of Music Advice/Help (1 Viewer)

[Winterseason]

Hello,

If I put this in the wrong section, feel free to move this thread.

Currently, I passed grade 4 music of theory May 2012. My music teacher makes all the students sit the test in May so I've got to decide now if I am taking it or not or else I'll run out of time. My skills I need to most improve on: hamony and the creative section.

1. Harmony accounts for 32 marks of the exam (according to past paper Aug. 2011), does buying Blitz Book of Harmony Rules Music Theory helps to improve and can it be used self-learnt or do you need a teacher to explain the book?

2. Which theory book(s) did you use for grade 5? For grade 4 I used: How to Blitz Grade 4 Theory and an old purple book.

3. How to improve in the creative section? (writing a melody for a poem or continue the given opening to make a balanced eight-bar melody)

4. How long did it take you to prepare for the exam? Plus, how many hours did you study per day or week?

Thanks in advance

 

[madharris]

I never did theory only 5th grade music craft.
I didn't really study at all. I did 2 exercises homework things a week (over a 20 week period) with maybe a week before the exam just to kinda crappily revise.

For theory, i've heard that the blitz book is really good, it's what many of my friends used.

I reckon all you can do is practice until you understand for anything that you need to improve on

 

[qrpw]

I passed grade 5 theory a few years ago.

If you want a good mark, Dulcie Holland's Master your Theory books are by far the better workbook. In the Blitz books Coates kind of skims through the knowledge that you'll need, as she tries to make it 'fun', resulting in stuff like 3-4 general sentences for each musical form (definitely not enough) and probably only 7-9 harmony exercises in the whole book.
There is no point self-learning harmony- if you don't want a teacher, you still must get someone to mark the exercises you do as you cannot spot the mistakes yourself. They'll take away marks for the smallest mistakes, and from personal experience, there will be lots of small errors you will make that you won't know you made. Harmony is pretty easy to improve- do maybe 5-8 8-bar phrases each two weeks and the mistakes will start drying up.

For the creative, just keep it safe and make it sound nice and simple, like a folk song. Don't do weird melodic progressions or modern stuff and just stay in 4/4/4/4 bar structure. There are chord structures you can memorise to 'force' yourself to write a nice melody, but if you do a few practice runs it shouldn't be too hard to compose a melody off the top of your head. (especially if you are classically trained)

30min/week is more than enough for an easy pass I think- that is, 30mins of full concentration. Finish the book, while doing extra harmony exercises (harmony is the most important part) and do 2-3 past papers as the exam gets closer. If you want Honours maybe 1 hour/week, but then I only did 30min/week for 6th grade and got Honours, so it depends on the person.


Edit: doing the exam in May? That's pretty quick- I usually had a year to prepare for every Theory exam so I suppose you'll have to double all the amounts of work I said and work much harder.

 

[Winterseason]

Thank you for your inputs.
The only reason of wanting to self-learn harmony is because I have no music lessons in the holidays. So I would have already used about 1.5 months out of 5 months until the exam. Now, it looks like the Dulcie Hollands book is more suited and in depth as you said. Though, I do not know which book my teacher would use or even change me to musicanship. I think I'll buy the Dulcie Hollands book and work at bits and pieces I know I can do and buy any other books if needed.