"Amy Absher's The Black Musician and the White City tells the story of African American musicians in Chicago during the mid-twentieth century. While depicting the segregated city before World War II, Absher traces the migration of black musicians, both men and women and both classical and vernacular performers, from the American South to Chicago during the 1930s to 1950s.
Absher's work diverges from existing studies in three ways: First, she takes the history beyond the study of jazz and blues by examining the significant role that classically trained black musicians played in building the Chicago South Side community. By acknowledging the presence and importance of classical musicians, Absher argues that black migrants in Chicago had diverse education and economic backgrounds but found common cause in the city's music community. Second, Absher brings numerous maps to the history, illustrating the relationship between Chicago's physical lines of segregation and the geography of black music in the city over the years. Third, Absher's use of archival sources is both extensive and original, drawing on manuscript and oral history collections at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, Columbia University, Rutgers's Institute of Jazz Studies, and Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archive. By approaching the Chicago black musical community from these previously untapped angles, Absher offers a history that goes beyond the retelling of the achievements of the famous musicians by discussing musicians as a group. In The Black Musician and the White City, black musicians are the leading actors, thinkers, organizers, and critics of their own story"--Publisher's website.

This text provides readers with a comprehensive study of the theory and analysis of tonal Western art music. Author Andre Mount begins by building a strong foundation in the understanding of rhythm, meter, and pitch as well as the notational conventions associated with each. From there, he guides the reader through an exploration of polyphony—the simultaneous sounding of multiple independent melodies—and an increasingly rich array of different sonorites that grow out of this practice. The book culminates with a discussion of musical form, engaging with artistic works in their entirety by considering the interaction of harmonic and thematic elements, but also such other musical dimensions as rhythm, meter, texture, and expression.

Introduction to Music Appreciation is about listening, appreciating, understanding, and discussing music. It explores the history, aesthetics, and criticism of Western music for an enhanced understanding of the topic. Chapters include:

Musical Elements, Critical Listening, and Course Overview;
Early Western Art Music;
The Baroque Era;
The Classical Era;
The Romantic Period;
Twentieth-Century Music;
Jazz; and
Music of the World.

This course is a survey of the world's music with attention to musical styles and cultural contexts. Included are the musical and cultural histories of Ociania, Indonesia, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Course Outcomes:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of diverse peoples, cultural communities, and traditions while reflecting upon and challenging individual and societal ethnocentrism.
2. Describe and discuss music using appropriate terminology relevant for the field of ethnomusicology.
3. Analyze and identify music from a global intercultural perspective using analytical and critical listening skills.
4. Explain artistic, social, historical, and cultural contexts of world music.

"The purpose of this course is to help students further enhance their appreciation for music as a creative tool of the imagination, as entertainment, and as a window into who we are as social beings. Part of the course also helps students to advance their listening skills, which leads to a better understand of what music actually contains. For this purpose, the course explores western classical music; American folk, popular and religious music; along with a sampling of music from non-western cultures.
Course content is divided into modules. Each module includes text readings, listening examples, videos, and study/review questions. Thought-provoking discussion board topics, written assignments, Power Point presentations, and group projects are also included in some of the modules"--Open Course Library.

Authors' Description:

"The author of this text has intentionally kept it general in nature in order to create a platform for those who want to expand content into more in depth studies of the mentioned concepts and traditions. I believe that appreciation of any subject comes from open-minded exposure to that topic. With the arts this generally must happen at a moment when the message and meaning of the work resonates naturally with the appreciator.

Each instructor of music appreciation brings a unique expertise in differing genres. I encourage you to utilize this text along with musical examples of your choice. The music appreciation specific goals (found in the syllabus) vary between individual classes as the instructors see fit. These goals will be achieved by those who have competently met all of the requirements of the course. For the course that this text accompanies the goals for each student are:

To gain basic exposure to the elements of music and their treatment in music
To learn historical and cultural signifiers in a diverse body of music • To approach listening to music actively/analytically and to reflect on the experience
To understand the factors that contribute to musical style in their own music and music presented in the course
To gain knowledge about differing musical aesthetics and trends
To become more knowledgeable and sensitive to varied human expression through music
If we endeavor together to reach these course goals the successful student will be able to:

Describe elements of music that s/he hears, employing correct musical terminology
Place music into an appropriate historical and cultural context
Listen critically and discuss a wide variety of musical styles
Analyze the stylistic features of a diverse group of musical styles
Identify nationalistic tendencies in musical expression
Identify musical diversity and aspects of our global society"--Galileo Open Learning Materials.

This collection is the second of five dealing with the rudiments of music.

This text is designed to introduce students to works representative of a variety of music traditions including the repertoires of Western Europe from the Middle Ages through the present; of the United States, including art music, jazz, folk, rock, musical theater; and from at least two non-Western world areas (Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent). A primary goal is to enable students to speak and write about the features of the music, employing vocabulary and concepts of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, timbre,and form used by musicians. The texts explores the historic, social, and cultural contexts and the role of class, ethnicity, and gender in the creation and performance of music, including practices of improvisation and the implications of oral and notated transmission. Similarly, the text aims to acquaint students with the sources of musical sounds—instruments and voices from different cultures, found sounds, electronically generated sounds; basic principles that determine pitch and timbre. Lastly, the text aims to examine students to the influence of technology, mass media, globalization, and transnational currents on the music of today.

This text provides just a small sampling of some of the various musical styles and traditions that might be found, though the skills developed in this course can be applied to any type of music.

Redhotjazz.com was a crown jewel of the early internet. Starting in the mid ’90s it made the offline discographies and biographies of early jazz available to the online public. It also hosted thousands of audio files donated by people who were digitizing their 78 RPM record collections, making many obscure recordings available for the first time. This all started long before Youtube and even before Wikipedia was much more than an idea.

We are duplicating the content of the Red Hot Jazz Archive from a snapshot saved in Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Keeping with both the original intent and mission of Redhotjazz.org everything will be publicly available outside of our paywall. For ease of use we are improving each entry to meet the norms of the phone friendly modern internet.

Welcome to Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context! Although this book is intended primarily for use in the college music appreciation classroom, it was designed with consideration for independent learners, advanced high school students, and experienced musicians. That is to say, it includes enough detail that expert guidance is not required and is written using broadly-accessible language. At the same time, it addresses advanced topics and positions music as a serious object of study

Understanding Basic Music Theory is a comprehensive insight into the fundamental notions of music theory: music notation, rules of harmony, ear training, etc. It covers most of the topics needed to understand and develop one's musical skills.

Understanding Music: Past and Present is an open Music Appreciation textbook co-authored by music faculty across Georgia. The text covers the fundamentals of music and the physics of sound, an exploration of music from the Middle Ages to the present day, and a final chapter on popular music in the United States.