Aural Skills in Context by Matthew Shaftel, Evan Jones, and Juan Chattah is the first complete text covering sight singing, ear training, and rhythm practice that features real musical examples (from classical to folk and jazz) as the composer wrote them. Other texts either feature simple melody lines that are edited from the standard repertoire or author-composed examples. By offering the melodies with the addition of the related harmony part, the book parallels the full Music Theory curriculum, resulting in a more comprehensive engagement than the typical sight-singing text. This approach reinforces the relevance of the aural skills curriculum to the students' other classes, as well as to their performance and listening interests. It exposes students to many examples of music that they will surely revisit as performers, scholars, or educators. It also gives a wealth of options for the instructor and students, going well beyond simply singing the melodies or writing them down from dictation. Improvisation; performance by multiple voices; switching between melody and accompanying lines; and creating new melodies above a given bass line, or an additional obbligato voice above the given melody or between the outer voices are all possible.
