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- Hacker News
- '21st-Century' in the title is doing the work of distinguishing, not describing. An open-licensed textbook with homework is the actual novelty, and that's worth putting in the title.by salt_pine
- How can this be fairly labelled "for the 21st-Century Classroom" when even 20th-century techniques aren't adequately represented? Electronic and computer music techniques are conspicuously absent. Microtonality has a rich history as well which is not even footnoted here.by waffletower
- SVG illustrations, too? Delicious! This is how an online textbook should be done. Bravo.by sedivy94
- I dunno. On first glance, for a "21st-Century" textbook, this seems to place a high emphasis on classical music theory, and moves very highly influential modern styles to the back burner -- notably jazz. And there is essentially no discussion of music theory in other cultures (middle eastern, african, east asian, indian), nor current analysis of pop and rock music.by SeanLuke
- Very cool but what does this have to do with "21st-Century Classroom"? Is that just a meaningless phrase to make it sound modern, not old-fashioned?by tantalor
- I can't recommend enough Absolutely Understand Guitar[0], it's free and taught me music theory than any course I've ever tried.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg1L-sBIxnY&list=PLJwa8GA7pX...
by zkanda - https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ link takes you to the homeworks/assignments and everything else for a self-study/auto-didact to follow along. Neat!by ultrasounder
- Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.
Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.
Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.
I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.
by stackghost