Using Roger Kamien Music An Appreciation 7th Brief Edition Without Losing Your Mind
I teach music appreciation at a community college, and this textbook shows up in my syllabus every semester. It is a decent resource if you know how to use it, but it has some real quirks that students trip over constantly. I am going to walk through how to actually get value out of it instead of just skimming pages you will never reference again. The book covers the standard Western art music timeline — medieval through contemporary — with heavy emphasis on form, harmony, and listening skills. Each chapter pairs a historical period with musical examples and analysis exercises. The brief edition cuts out some of the deeper musicology and cultural context that the full version includes, which matters more than you might think. Here is the thing nobody tells you about this book. The listening examples are not organized chronologically within each chapter. They jump around based on form and genre rather than date. If you are trying to build a mental timeline while you read, you will get confused. I have students do this every year. The workaround is simple: keep a separate timeline document open while you read, and note the approximate date of each listening example as you go. Takes five minutes per chapter and saves you from mixing up Baroque and Classical era works later when you are studying for the midterm.
The analysis sections in chapters 4 through 8 are where most people stall out. These cover sonata form, rondo, theme and variations, and the like. The book explains the concepts clearly enough, but the diagrams assume you already have some foundational knowledge of scales and keys. If you walk into this course with zero music theory background, those chapters will feel impenetrable for the first week or two. You do not need to panic about it. Just watch a few YouTube lectures on basic major and minor scales and chord construction before tackling those chapters. That prep work usually cuts your reading time in half. One thing the textbook does not address well is the listening quiz format. The quizzes often ask you to identify a form or period from a short excerpt, but the book itself rarely gives you practice questions that mirror the actual test style. I recommend pairing the book with the accompanying online listening program — the one linked through the publisher. It has matching exercises and form identification drills that are much closer to what your professor will actually put on the exam. Using both together is probably the highest-yield study strategy for this course. There are also some outdated references in the 7th edition. The discussion of 20th-century music skews heavily toward serialism and minimalism, with very little coverage of jazz-influenced classical composition or music theater as concert repertoire. If your course touches on those areas, you will need supplemental material. I usually point students toward a few freely available lecture series from MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford to fill the gaps. The textbook alone will not prepare you for those topics.
The appendices are actually useful if you read them. Appendix A on musical terms and Appendix B on composers by period get ignored by most students, but they save you from flipping back and forth through the index constantly. Bookmark them in your PDF or highlight them if you have the print copy. I have seen students waste at least twenty minutes per study session just searching for definitions that are compiled in one place at the back of the book. A final note on the brief edition versus the full edition. The brief version removes several case studies and some of the non-Western music content. If your course does not emphasize world music, the brief edition is fine. If it does, you are missing material. Check your syllabus before you buy. The difference in price between the two editions is usually ten to fifteen dollars, and buying the wrong one means you are either paying extra for nothing or scrambling to find the missing chapters online. The book works best when you treat it as a reference guide rather than a cover-to-cover read. Go in with the chapter objectives, listen to the examples actively while you read the corresponding section, and do the practice exercises even if they are not graded. That last point is important because the ungraded exercises are the only place in the book where you actually test your understanding before the exam hits you with it.
Get the Full Details
