The only music appreciation text on the market to include listening exercises throughout the book, Listening to Music, Sixth Edition, masterfully develops and refines your listening skills. Acclaimed for unparalleled clarity and accuracy, using Wright will help you study efficiently, do well on your tests and quizzes, and learn to enjoy many kinds of music. Wright covers traditional Western music from medieval to modern as well as popular music and its impact on musical globalization, and music from the Far East, the Near East and Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, drawing comparisons between Western and non-Western musical cultures.

Learning to listen critically is at the heart of a music appreciation course, and Wright gives you the tools to develop and sharpen your listening skills in three important ways:

-First, Listening to Music is the only text to include detailed Listening Exercises throughout the book. These exercises, which ask questions just like the ones your instructor is likely to ask in quizzes, will help you focus on important musical elements and episodes and do well in the course.

-Second, a free "Introduction to Listening" CD is packaged with each copy of the text. This CD plays all of the music discussed in the music fundamentals chapters in Part I of the text to help you get a good start in the first few weeks of class.

-Third, interactive Active Listening Guides and listening quizzes, with streaming music for most of the selections in the text, are available on the Schirmer Cengage Learning website and multimedia eBook.

Wright's book is a great introduction to the Western tradition, and a fair introduction to the world's music as a whole. He not only provides you with a nicely packaged history of music, composers, and culture, but also gives you a peak into the personal lives within the societies of these periods.