Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Comprehensive Musicianship, A Practical Resource
Randall Harlow; Heather Peyton; Jonathan Schwabe; Daniel Swilley · Iowa State University Digital Press · 2023
This OER presents an integrated suite of learning resources developed for the core music theory and musicianship curriculum at the University of Northern Iowa School of Music. It provides a more comprehensive symbiosis of musicianship and music theory learning than can be found in existing textbooks, including engaging and progressive video demonstrations and interactive listening and vocal exercises that integrate musical knowledge with foundational musical skills.
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A Practical Approach to Understanding Music Theory
Charles Brooks · University of North Alabama · 2022
A Practical Approach to Understanding Music Theory is a textbook designed for the non-music performance major or music business/audio engineer who needs to professionally interface with musicians without needing to write or compose music. The material is designed around a spiral learning model in which a very simple straightforward concept is introduced, defined and explained. From this point and forward the book adds one element of music theory after another until a broad base of musical understanding and application is achieved. Even though the spiral learning model has a linear approach, the book is also laid out in a manner that any music student or hobbyist may treat it as a research manual to search out specific explanations of musical situations they encounter. This text is meant to be an all-inclusive explanation of how music is created, graphically distributed and performed for those who are not majoring in music theory, performance or education. It is aimed at those who are seeking a career in audio engineering, music business, artist representation, minoring in music, teaching lessons in a local community or someone who just wants to learn to play and understand music on a deeper level. The material is designed around a spiral learning model in which a very simple straightforward concept is introduced, defined and explained. From this point and forward the book adds one element of music theory after another until a broad base of musical understanding and application is achieved. Even though the spiral learning model has a linear approach, the book is also laid out in a manner that any music student or hobbyist may treat it as a research manual to search out specific explanations of musical situations they encounter. This text is meant to be an all-inclusive explanation of how music is created, graphically distributed and performed for those who are not majoring in music theory, performance or education. It is aimed at those who are seeking a career in aud
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Musics: Diversity, Difference, and Synergies
Ted Conner · Muhlenberg College · 2026
Musics: Diversity, Difference, and Synergies is a radical re-imagining of how music can be studied. Non-Western, vernacular, and Western art music are valued equally and studied at the same level of depth. Of equal importance is the emphasis placed on hands-on doing. Scales common to Jazz and Western art music are learned by playing them on the piano. Rhythmic skills are embodied on the darbuka, a Middle Eastern goblet drum, through the study of Turkish rhythmic cycles called usuller. Pitch recognition is developed by singing paltas (pitch patterns) for Indian ragas and melodic studies for Turkish makamlar using fixed-do solmization systems. Training in moveable-do solfege for Western art music begins with conducting as a foundation. This is followed by the addition of takadimi syllables for rhythm, solfege syllables aligned with scale degrees, and, finally, pitch. Exploring improvisational practices from diverse cultures and genres is also prioritized. The study of Turkish usuller begins with basic forms that are then embellished through a series of ornamented variations that serve as models for developing improvisational skills. The preparatory exercises for ragas and tetrachord and pentachord studies for makamlar provide the foundation for improvisational techniques explored in these genres. Improvising over harmonic progressions common in Jazz is the first practical application of playing major scales on the piano. This first step is followed by the development of more focused improvisational approaches that parallel the growth of knowledge and skill sets. Another important principle in Musics is applying the pedagogical approaches used by practitioners of the musics in the cultures in which they are situated. Pedagogies are often intertwined with the epistemological and methodological frames that define the role and function of music within a culture. Developing an understanding of why and how music is practiced speaks toward an integrative model of engaging wi
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The Art of Music: Music Appreciation with an Equity Lens
Amy McGlothlin; Jennifer Bill · ROTEL · 2024
The Art of Music: Music Appreciation with an Equity Lens is a music appreciation textbook that features musical examples and photographs that represent the demographics of our students today. Special attention has been paid in choosing to represent women and minorities. World Music photographs and videos represent the music's areas of origin.
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Music Composition & Theory
Justin Rubin · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2024
A Step-by-Step Method for student composers to write in a variety of styles, genres, and forms. Driven by simple model examples and accompanied by audio samples, it is intended to develop individual creativity and confidence in writing and, in so doing, explore the student’s inherent expressive talents. Each chapter provides reference examples from the literature for the student to discover works by master composers.
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Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context
Esther Morgan-Ellis · University of North Georgia Press · 2020
Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context offers a fresh curriculum for the college-level music appreciation course. The musical examples are drawn from classical, popular, and folk traditions from around the globe. These examples are organized into thematic chapters, each of which explores a particular way in which human beings use music. Topics include storytelling, political expression, spirituality, dance, domestic entertainment, and more. The chapters and examples can be taught in any order, making Resonances a flexible resource that can be adapted to your teaching or learning needs. This textbook is accompanied by a complete set of PowerPoint slides and learning objectives.
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Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician's Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing
Kathleen DeLaurenti; Andrea Copland · The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University · 2024
Based on coursework developed at the Peabody Conservatory, this book serves as a crucial resource for early career musicians navigating the complexities of the digital era. This guide bridges the gap between creative practice and scholarly research, empowering musicians to confidently share and protect their work as they expand their performing lives beyond the concert stage as citizen artists. It offers a plain language resource that helps early career musicians see where creative practice and creative research intersect and how to traverse information systems to share their work. As professional musicians and researchers, the authors’ experiences on stage and in academia makes this guide an indispensable tool for musicians aiming to thrive in the digital landscape.
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Pay for Play: How the Music Industry Works, Where the Money Goes, and Why
Larry Wayte · University of Oregon Libraries · 2023
The history of music is closely linked to the history of copyright law. This book explores how the law shaped music and the music industry. From church and court patronage in pre-19th Century Europe, to the effects of social media on music, this book explores the abiding influence of the law on music.
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Exploring the Arts: A Brief Introduction to Art, Theatre, Music, and Dance
Doris Hall; Kimberly Berkeley; Nubia Khan · LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network
This textbook was created as part of the Interactive OER for Dual Enrollment project, facilitated by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network and funded by a $2 million Open Textbooks Pilot Program grant from the Department of Education. This project supports the extension of access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities to high school students across Louisiana and beyond. This project features a collaboration between educational systems in Louisiana, the library community, Pressbooks technology partner, and workforce representatives. It will enable and enhance the delivery of open educational resources (OER) and interactive quiz and assessment elements for priority dual enrollment courses in Louisiana and nationally. Developed OER course materials will be released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification and sharing with others. The target audience for this project and this textbook are dual enrollment students. Dual enrollment is the opportunity for a student to be enrolled in high school and college at the same time. A dual enrollment student receives credit on both their high school and college transcripts for the same course.
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Music Appreciation: History, Culture, and Context
Bonnie Le; Francis Scully; Steven Edwards · LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network
Music makes us human. Every culture on earth has music. In fact, every human society extending back into prehistoric times has had music. Most of us are surrounded by music. We use it to enhance our mood and to regulate our metabolism, to keep us awake and help us go to sleep, as background to accompany the work, study, exercise, and relaxation that fills our days. But it is precisely when music steps out of this background and asks for our attention, engages our memory and our expectations, that it becomes a fundamentally artistic endeavor. Music is a sonic response to a question that’s not really about sound at all, but rather is historical and social. The study of music is the study of human thought, experience, and history. This course is about the musical imagination. It’s how to think about music, but it’s also about music as a mode of thinking. (inspired by Michael Hays, Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design: Welcome to The Architectural Imagination (edx.org). This textbook was created as part of the Interactive OER for Dual Enrollment project, facilitated by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network and funded by a $2 million Open Textbooks Pilot Program grant from the Department of Education. This project supports the extension of access to high-quality post-secondary opportunities to high school students across Louisiana and beyond. This project features a collaboration between educational systems in Louisiana, the library community, Pressbooks technology partner, and workforce representatives. It will enable and enhance the delivery of open educational resources (OER) and interactive quiz and assessment elements for priority dual enrollment courses in Louisiana and nationally. Developed OER course materials will be released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification and sharing with others.The target audience for this project and this textbook are dual enrollment students. Dual enrollment is t
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The Bible and Music
James McGrath · PALNI · 2023
The Bible and Music by Dr. James F. McGrath provides an introduction and overview of the various ways that music and the Bible have been and continue to be connected. Part 1 focuses on history, presenting what we know about how music in the Ancient Near East sounded, how markings in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible have been interpreted as musical symbols, how chanting of biblical texts has featured liturgically in synagogues and churches, the impact of the Protestant Reformation, and musical developments in North America as enslaved Africans encountered biblical texts and stories. Part 2 focuses on specific texts in Jewish and Christian scripture and looks at how they have been interpreted through the process of setting them to music, including the soundtracks of cinematic depictions of biblical narrative and allusions to the Bible in popular music. Part 3 focuses on composers from the Middle Ages all the way down to the present day. Throughout the book, musical examples are not merely mentioned but embedded so that reading and listening may be seamlessly combined. The book does not presume prior knowledge of either music or the Bible, and additional links within the text provide definitions and further explanations for those who need or desire them.
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Music on the Move
Danielle Fosler-Lussier · University of Michigan Press · 2020
Music is a mobile art. When people move to faraway places, whether by choice or by force, they bring their music along. Music creates a meaningful point of contact for individuals and for groups; it can encourage curiosity and foster understanding; and it can preserve a sense of identity and comfort in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. As music crosses cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries, it continually changes. While human mobility and mediation have always shaped music-making, our current era of digital connectedness introduces new creative opportunities and inspiration even as it extends concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and cultural appropriation. With its innovative multimodal approach, Music on the Move invites readers to listen and engage with many different types of music as they read. The text introduces a variety of concepts related to music's travels—with or without its makers—including colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity. The case studies represent a variety of musical genres and styles, Western and non-Western, concert music, traditional music, and popular music. Highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich, Music on the Move is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers. Citable link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9853855
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Fundamentals of Music Theory
Nikki Moran; Michael Edwards; Richard Worth; Zack Moir · University of Edinburgh · 2021
This open e-book is the result of a project funded by a University of Edinburgh Student Experience Grant, Open e-Textbooks for access to music education. The project was a collaboration between Open Educational Resources Service, and staff and student interns from the Reid School of Music. As a proof-of-concept endeavour, the project aimed to explore how effectively we could convert existing course content into convenient and reusable open formats suitable for use by staff and students both within and beyond the University. The resulting e-book presents open licensed educational materials that deal with the building blocks of musical stave (sometimes known as staff) notation, a language designed to communicate about musical ideas which is in use around the world. The resources in this e-book include video lectures and their transcripts, as well as supporting text explanations, examples and illustrations. The materials introduce topics such as the organisation of discrete pitches into scales and intervals, and temporal organisation of musical sounds as duration, in rhythm and metre. These rudiments are presented through an introduction to the elements of five-line stave notation, and through critical discussion of the advantages and limitations served by notational systems in the representation and analysis of musical sounds. This serves as the basis of further explanations, to illustrate musical concepts including key, time signature, harmonisation, cadence and modulation. We anticipate that subsequent versions of this e-book will update and develop the contents and presentation of the materials, following the success of this student-led collaboration.
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Music in World Cultures
Matthew Mihalka ; Justin Hunter · University of Arkansas · 2021
This text provides just a small sampling of some of the various musical styles and traditions that might be found, though the skills developed in this course can be applied to any type of music.
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Fundamentals, Function, and Form: Theory and Analysis of Tonal Western Art Music
Andre Mount · Milne Open Textbooks · 2020
Fundamentals, Function, and Form by Andre Mount—with editorial and pedagogical input from Lee Rothfarb—provides its readers with a comprehensive study of the theory and analysis of tonal Western art music. Mount begins by building a strong foundation in the understanding of rhythm, meter, and pitch as well as the notational conventions associated with each. From there, he guides the reader through an exploration of polyphony—the simultaneous sounding of multiple independent melodies—and an increasingly rich array of different sonorites that grow out of this practice. The book culminates with a discussion of musical form, engaging with artistic works in their entirety by considering the interaction of harmonic and thematic elements, but also such other musical dimensions as rhythm, meter, texture, and expression. Along the way, Mount supplements the text with over eight hundred musical examples which, in the online version of the text, include embedded audio files for immediate aural reinforcement of theoretical concepts. Most of these examples are drawn from the literature, including nearly 200 excerpts by women and other underrepresented groups. The reader is also given the opportunity to check their understanding of the text with interactive exercises at every step of the way. Fundamentals, Function, and Form was written with the undergraduate music student in mind, but self-guided readers would also be rewarded with a deep understanding of this musical tradition.
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Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
Robert Hutchinson · Robert Hutchinson · 2017
Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom is an openly–licensed online four–semester college music theory textbook. This text differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In my opinion, this led to students having difficulty with creating melodies, since the training they are given is typically to write a “melody” in quarter notes in the soprano voice of part writing exercises. When the assignments in those texts ask students to do more than this, the majority of the students struggle to create a melody with continuity and with appropriate placement of harmonies within a phrase because the text had not prepared them to do so. In Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom, students learn about motive, fragment, phrase, and subphrase, as well as types of melodic alteration like inversion, intervallic change, augmentation, diminution, rhythmic change, ornamentation, extension, and retrograde. By understanding motive and subphrase (also known as “phrase segment” or “phrase member”), I believe students will better understand the logic and construction of melodies, which will aid them in creating their own music. This text is meant to take the student from the basics of reading and writing pitches and rhythms through twelve–tone technique and minimalism over the course of four semesters. Whenever possible, examples from popular music and music from film and musical theater are included to illustrate melodic and harmonic concepts, usually within the context of the phrase.
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¡Que viva la música!: Repaso de conversación en español
Norma Corrales-Martin · North Broad Press · 2021
¡Qué viva la música! Repaso de conversación en español, or Long Live Music! Spanish Conversational Review is an open textbook intended for conversational review, typically a fourth-semester Spanish class. The textbook is organized around nine different songs that provide students opportunities to practice, aurally and orally, as well as in writing, the main communicative goals and key grammatical structures learned in previous classes. It can also be used in similar high school classes.
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Music Fundamentals 2: Rhythm and Meter
Terry Ewell; Catherine Schmidt-Jones · OpenStax CNX · 2013
This collection is the second of five dealing with the rudiments of music.
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Music Fundamentals 1: Pitch and Major Scales and Keys
Terry Ewell; Catherine Schmidt-Jones · OpenStax CNX · 2013
This collection is the first of five dealing with the rudiments of music.
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Music: Its Language, History, and Culture
Douglas Cohen · CUNY Academic Works · 2015
Welcome to Music 1300, Music: Its Language History, and Culture. The course has a numberof interrelated objectives:1. To introduce you to works representative of a variety of music traditions.These include the repertoires of Western Europe from the Middle Agesthrough the present; of the United States, including art music, jazz, folk, rock, musical theater; and from at least two non-Western world areas (Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent).2. To enable you to speak and write about the features of the music you study,employing vocabulary and concepts of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, timbre,and form used by musicians.3. To explore with you the historic, social, and cultural contexts and the role of class, ethnicity, and gender in the creation and performance of music,including practices of improvisation and the implications of oral andnotated transmission.4. To acquaint you with the sources of musical sounds—instruments and voices fromdifferent cultures, found sounds, electronically generated sounds; basic principlesthat determine pitch and timbre.5. To examine the influence of technology, mass media, globalization, and transnationalcurrents on the music of today.The chapters in this reader contain definitions and explanations of musical terms and concepts,short essays on subjects related to music as a creative performing art, biographical sketchesof major figures in music, and historical and cultural background information on music fromdifferent periods and places.