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Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music.

“The term is used in three main ways in music, though all three are interrelated. The first is what is otherwise called ‘rudiments’, currently taught as the elements of notation, of key signatures, of time signatures, of rhythmic notation, and so on. Theory in this sense is treated as the necessary preliminary to the study of harmony, counterpoint, and form. The second is the study of writings about music from ancient times onwards. […] The third is an area of current musicological study that seeks to define processes and general principles in music — a sphere of research that can be distinguished from analysis in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built.”

Sight-reading, also called a prima vista (Italian meaning “at first sight”), is the reading and performing of a piece of music or song in music notation that the performer has not seen before. Sight-singing is used to describe a singer who is sight-reading. Both activities require the musician to play or sing the notated rhythms and pitches. Many believe that sight-singing is the more challenging of the two, because the musicians do not have any keys, frets or valves (on keyboard instruments, guitars, and valved brass instruments, respectively) to help them obtain the correct pitches. However, difficulty is related both to the instrument and the difficulty of the piece itself. For instance, sight-reading on a polyphonic instrument, such as the classical guitar, can be more challenging due to the fact that the guitarist has to read polyrhythms and polyphonic passages that can often be played in different positions using different frets.

In music, solfège or solfeggio also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a music education method used to teach pitch and sight singing of Western music. Solfège is a form of solmization, and though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, the systems used in other music cultures such as swara, durar mufaṣṣalāt and Jianpu are discussed in their respective articles.

Syllables are assigned to the notes of the scale and enable the musician to audiate, or mentally hear, the pitches of a piece of music which he or she is seeing for the first time and then to sing them aloud. Through the Renaissance various interlocking 4, 5 and 6-note systems were employed to cover the octave. The tonic sol-fa method popularized the seven syllables commonly used in English-speaking countries: do (or doh in tonic sol-fa), re, mi, fa, so(l), la, and ti

There are two current schools of applying solfège: 1) fixed do, where the syllables are always tied to specific pitches (e.g. “do” is always “C-natural”) and 2) movable do, where the syllables are assigned to scale degrees (“do” is always the first degree of the major scale).

Musicianship is a broad concept that covers a complex range of musical abilities. For the purposes of this syllabus, it is loosely defined as the ability to ‘think in sound’. This occurs when a musician is able to produce music which they perceive internally and in the imagination, whether through playing by ear, singing, reading from notation, or through improvisation.