Announcing – Public Domain Music Theory Text Book
As any college student will tell you, textbooks are priced outrageously high. That’s not really news of course. Yet one of our volunteers was especially shocked recently to see how expensive a music theory textbook was for his class and suggested that Musopen find a way to print professionally bound theory books, equal or better to what exists, to solve this problem. We liked the idea so much we decided to do just that.
Today we are announcing the formation of the Musopen PD Music Theory text book project. I will be updating with more news and details as we get closer to a final product, but I can say we are already excited to have found several partners who will allow us to produce books equal to what exist currently as well as web integration better than any previous textbook has had in the past. All this for the cost of the ink and paper only.
If you or your school would like to get involved with the project, please click here.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Don’t forget to take a look at the great music theory lessons from Catherine Schmidt-Jones on http://cnx.org
And since her work is licensed under CC-BY 1.0, it leaves the possibility open to reuse her work for your public domain music book as long as you give her attribution. Correct me if I’m wrong.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
There is one free music theory textbook, Understanding Basic Music Theory by Catherine Schmidt-Jones, see http://cnx.org/content/col10363/latest/
It isn’t public domain, but under the most liberal Creative Commons license which only requires attribution even for commercial uses.
I’m sure there is room for competition in this space!
Mike
September 11th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
This is exciting! I hope it is ready by next semester when I plan on taking a music theory class.
A suggestion: Add some AP related materials/linking to help high school students studying for the AP Music Theory Test. And would this include audio examples? Many texts come bundled with a CD.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
How is this coming along? It’s a very interesting project and some information on it’s progress would be very nice indeed.
Yagan
December 5th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Hello!
I think the project’s a great idea!
Incidentally, about chord notation, and musical terminology in general, I notice that there’s quite some variation among different people and different countries. (So, for example, in the UK, inversions of chords are commonly represented by letters rather than figures. And I once saw a slightly amusing occurrence on an American internet forum for help with music theory, where a UK ‘A’-level student had posted a question about the labelling of a chord in his/her course material as ‘Ic’ when the notes of the chord didn’t seem to form a 2nd inversion tonic; to which the American theory teachers responded by saying that they were curious about this unusual notation and spent some time trying to research it; and one posted back, saying that after some research, the ‘c’ notation seemed to be … . Now I don’t actually remember what the “…” was, but it was nothing remotely about 2nd inversion.)
So I think it might be worth including mention of different notations and terminology. (Even in the concepts of music theory there is some variation; I’ve heard, for example, that apparently Russian theorists regard the submediant German Sixth as a dominant-functioning chord because of its standard resolution onto a tonic I6/4 chord.)
Well, I hope the project all goes well.
Julian.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Great info!
December 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
[...] Of interest too is the access to public domain sheet music. It is simple to obtain with no strange formats or random wiki text. You can preview before you download or print, and there are live previews of sheet music using Scribd. There is also available for order public domain sheet music for the cost of printing and shipping. Musopen has even announced the development of a Public Domain Music Theory Text Book. [...]
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:49 am
[...] Olav Torvund’s Guitar Blog