Resources for Online Music Theory Teaching

Many of our institutions are moving classes online temporarily or for the rest of the semester. The resources below are intended to serve as references for all theory instructors preparing to move online.

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Table of Contents

• Files Shared on HC
• Open access articles, books, and textbooks
• Websites with Music Theory Content
• Websites with Ear Training Content
• YouTube Channels
• Technology tips and guides

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Files Shared on HC

Don't forget to check the Files tab, where users have uploaded any course materials they want to share. Add your own, too—use the categories "online" and "pedagogy".

Open access articles, books, and textbooks

• Open Music Theory (OMT) has a very complete, if bare-bones, curriculum
• Contemporary Musicianship has a few chapters up online that discuss extended tertian chords, chromatic harmony, modulation, and form and has also shared PDFs of their assignments
• Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom is a complete and free online textbook by Robert Hutchinson
• A Species Counterpoint Primer (Michael Berry): first, second, and fourth species counterpoint after Fux

 

Websites with Music Theory Content

• Teoria has lessons and exercises for fundamentals, diatonic harmony, and some chromatic harmony concepts
• Artusi has online exercises for many theory topics and is free during the COVID-19 outbreak
• Theta Music Training has fundamentals exercises
• Rap Analysis — pretty self-explanatory!
• Top 40 Theory has analysis of pop music
• musictheory.net -- good tutorials and drills on fundamentals. Also has a mobile app, Tenuto.
• Music Theory Blog and Listening to 20th- and 21st-century music: two blogs by Michael Berry. The first one has pages labeled "partwriting help"--look under "Labels" in the menu hidden on the right-hand side.
• Music Theory Materials has music examples and handouts for a variety of form, fundamentals, and harmony topics

 

Websites with Ear Training Content

• Teoria has lessons and exercises for basic ear training
• TonedEar has lessons and exercises for basic ear training

 

Videos and YouTube Channels

• Fundamentals and diatonic harmony by Seth Monahan
• Assorted music theory topics from 12tone, from fundamentals to pop music to atonal music
• Introductory music theory videos from Michael Berry (covers the basics up to triads and seventh chords)
• Music theory and aural skills videos by Kent Cleland; topics for typical undergraduate harmony and aural skills courses.
• Chromatic harmony and 20th-c. videos by Wes Flinn
• A playlist of fundamentals videos by York College, CUNY
• Post-tonal videos from Zack Bernstein, mainly consistent with Straus text
• Fundamentals and diatonic harmony videos from Kati Meyer
• Dictation assignments from Cynthia Gonzales will be immensely helpful for distance learning aural skills
• Bryn Hughes has a handful of videos on integer notation, prime form, classical periods, and applied chords
• Intro to graduate music theory topics by Megan Lavengood, as well as undergrad set theory videos

 

Technology tips and guides

• How to get the best-quality audio to combine with your voice when creating video or video chatting is a guide for using Soundflower and LadioCast
• Slack and Discord can both be excellent for doing text-based chat sessions with students for Q&A, despite being designed for corporate environments and gaming, respectively
• Zoom basics for a quick-start guide with plenty of pictures
• Zoom for composition lessons 15-minute guide; probably adaptable for other types of one-on-one lessons
• Sam Zerin's teaching blog has a lot of reflections on online teaching
• 12 steps to design a digital assignment by Jesse Stommel. Jesse has a lot of writing on digital pedagogy; not all of them will be useable in the tight time constraints most of us are working in, but they might inspire you.
• Pre-recorded lecture videos using only Quicktime (mini-blogs compiled from twitter): [1] Overview [2] Making videos of Slide Presentation w/ Voice-over [3] Making "talking head" video with PDF Score annotation/or other applications (easy hack to get picture-in-picture)