Music Theory 21c is an online, open-source textbook designed for a two-year collegiate music theory sequence. While many textbooks follow a traditional curriculum centered around European classical music, this work offers a new approach which attempts to embrace both relevance and diversity in three specific ways:
While we commend the efforts of other authors to introduce musical and cultural diversity into the traditional curriculum, we believe that biases are often present in the basic structure of these curricula. By revising the fundamental approach to how we teach music theory, we hope to welcome all students into the field we so dearly love — a field that is ever-strengthened by their presence.
Music Theory 21c is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This means you can copy, share, revise and re-release all or part of this work under the following conditions:
We have made every effort to ensure that all multimedia materials included in this text are either available in the public domain or are available under a license that allows their inclusion. Embedded materials, such as YouTube videos, are not considered part of this work and are subject to the terms of the websites that store them. Materials which do not have attribution notice were created by the authors as part of the text.