OUR BOOK IS OUT!!!

What seems like one million years ago, Brad Osborn asked if I wanted to co-author a new music theory textbook with him. He had the idea to write a four-semester textbook that did the following things:

• Covered the traditional four-semester music theory content, BUT

  • Did it by centering popular music rather than art music AND

  • Amplified and the voices of living composers and non-white and non-male composers.

• Went further than the traditional four-semester music theory curriculum by

  • Including chapters on popular song form, digital effects, and song lyrics, AND

  • Incorporated workbook exercises designed to teach students how to make music, in addition to analyzing it.

I was honored to be asked, and I'm thrilled to announce that Music Theory Matters is currently available from Oxford University Press.

It does teach part writing and figured bass! It does teach atonal pitch class sets and serialism! But it really does so much more than that. It opens students up to the fact that this is a composer:

But so is this:

(This is Kamala Sankaram, a contemporary composer whose work we feature in Ch. 13: Classical Orchestration and Scoring.) THIS IS IMPORTANT. A student needs to be able to see a pathway for themselves into whatever they aim for in their musical future, and seeing examples of all types of people under the category of "composer" is absolutely invaluable.

There are a million other cool things in this book. We give students a chance to become fluid with the octatonic scale by having them rewrite a Britney Spears song. We get them familiar with the expressive possibilities of dual leading tone loops by asking them to write a rap that reflects a narrator being pulled in two directions simultaneously. We test their skills in figured bass by having them realize one written by the second Black man ever to vote in Britain (Ignatius Sancho! Look him up!)

I know, I know; I'm tooting my own horn. But I'm very proud of this! Brad and I have both been teaching from the manuscript for several years now, and we know that it works, both to cover course content and to engage students with music they love. I'll still be happy if we're the only ones who ever use it, but we really think it's worth adopting. If you're an instructor, please order a desk copy! And if you have any questions about how to use it with your students at your school, I would love to answer those questions personally, so please reach out!