I am taking Grade 6 this term and have been having some problems with the aurals. At Grade 5 the sight-singing was only 5 or 6 notes moving by no more than a 3rd (or a rising 4th at the end) - correct me if I'm wrong - but now it is is a real tune and can be major or minor. I can think of a few ways of doing this: by intervals from the note you have just sung, or by numbers of the scale/sol-fa, but I find it quite difficult. My teacher is trying to get me to recognise how each degree of the scale has a different sound, but I don't always get it.

The rest of the aurals are fine, I think, although it's sometimes hard to work out what time period the music is from, it can sound like it could be either late Romantic or early modern, for example.

I'm not sure any of that actually makes sense, but any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

Is grade 6 the one where you get an accompaniment?
I found the one with the accompaniment the easiest as you have something to help to keep you in tune even though it's not playing the melody.

Recognising how each degree of the scale has a different sound seems like acquiring perfect pitch to me, and this is best done before the age of seven, though not totally impossible thereafter (according to Gillian Weir).

If you lack perfect pitch, intervals are the best method. There is a page on my web site here that you may find useful.

Thank you. I found the web-page on intervals quite helpful, although I know and already use some of those, it was good to learn some more.

I don't think my teacher meant perfect pitch, but it's quite hard to describe what he did mean - I think one example he gave was that you can tell the leading note because it feels like it's pulling up to the tonic. That wasn't worded very well, sorry!

Sbhoa - yes, at grade 6 it has an accompaniment, and yes it is helpful for trying to keep in tune. However, it can be off putting when a different melodic line is going on!

I think the best way to improve is probably just to keep on practising....

I think this is fairly close to knowing the sound of all intervals above the tonic and knowing what the tonic is at all times. At Grade 6 your sight reading will be in a key so that could work OK.

Intervals from the previous note still work if the music is not in a key, which happens in some music written long before Schoenberg and Co. started making a habit of it. There is more work involved, because you need to be able to deal with many intervals that don't occur above the tonic in the major or minor scales, e.g. augmented fifths; diminished fourths; diminished and augmented thirds, sixths and sevenths. It's probably not worth memorising the more extreme examples, like the doubly diminished fourth that Elgar wrote in "Sing unto the Lord": you deal with the ones you can't hear directly by enharmonic conversions* until you recognise the interval, which works perfectly if you are singing with a piano tuned in equal temperament, and is a good first approximation (to be corrected by careful listening) in a choir that uses a more accurate tuning of consonances (good amateur choirs do this instinctively, and the best professional groups think very hard about it).

* Consider the interval from the mediant to the leading note in a minor scale, say C to G# in A minor. This is an augmented fifth, but is somewhat less forbidding if you replace the G# with Ab, whereupon the interval becomes the more familiar minor sixth.