Everyone who studies an instrument wants to learn to read and write music. This way, they can play their favorite song. Once you know how to read and write the language of music, you can also start writing down your own songs. But every beginning music student wants the learning to be easy. The practice of reading and writing music is called Music Theory and the kids who study it also want it to be easy. I wrote Music Theory Grade 1 exactly for this reason – to make reading and writing music easy and fun. The pace of the book is much slower than most beginning theory books (it only covers the basics) and it’s very repetitious, so the basics are learned well.

To my surprise,  when I asked two of my young students (both aged 7) what they liked best about Music Theory Grade 1, they both had the same answer; the quizzes! When I further inquired as to why they liked the quizzes, one student said ‘because I get to feel like I win, if I get the answers right’. It occurred to me that this is what we all want. We want to learn slowly, but not so slowly we are bored, and we want opportunities to show off what we know. I said to my student “you said it kiddo”.

-Julia