21 School of the Arts
Art History
A Quick and Dirty Guide to Art, Music, and Culture
An open textbook by The Ohio State University that discusses art and music in the context of popular culture. It is meant to work with the open course Art and Music Since 1945.
Includes: Assignments, and supplementary course materials.
May suit: MUSIC 2B03 and ARTHIST 3JA3.
Music
Understanding Music: Past and Present
Understanding Music: Past and Present is a peer-reviewed 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.
Includes: Audio, video clips, and glossary.
May suit: ARTHIST 2T03 and MUSIC 1A03/1AA3/2B03/2MH3/2II3/3JJ3/3KK3.
Open Music Theory
Open Music Theory Version 2 (OMT2) is intended to serve as the primary text and workbook for undergraduate music theory curricula. As an open and natively-online resource, OMT2 is substantially different from other commercially-published music theory textbooks, though it still provides the same content that teachers expect from a music theory text. OMT2 has been designed inclusively. This means broadening our topics beyond the standard harmony and atonal theory topics to include fundamentals, musical form, jazz, pop, and orchestration. And within those traditional sections of harmony and atonal theory, the authors have deliberately chosen composers who represent diverse genders and races.
Includes: Video lessons, audio, interactive notated scores with playback, key takeaways, chapter playlists, small quizzes, assignments/worksheets and instructor resources (answer keys, exams, sample course outlines, discussion board, etc.).
May suit: MUSIC 1CR3/1CB3/2CA3/2CB3/4Z03.
Understanding Basic Music Theory
The main purpose of Understanding Basic Music Theory is to explore basic music theory so thoroughly that the interested student will then be able to easily pick up whatever further theory is wanted. Music history and the physics of sound are included to the extent that they shed light on music theory. Remember, the main premise of this course is that a better understanding of where the basics come from will lead to better and faster comprehension of more complex ideas.
May suit: MUSIC 1CR3.
Music 101
Music 101 provides students with the opportunity to learn about some of the greatest music ever written. The music written by many composers that will be studied has never been forgotten and never stopped being performed and loved.
May suit: MUSIC 1A03/1AA3/1MH3.
Theatre and Film Studies
Exploring Movie Construction and Production: What’s so Exciting about Movies?
This open textbook contains eight chapters of the major areas of film construction and production, including: theme; genre; narrative structure’ character portrayal; story; plot; directing style; cinematography; and editing.
Includes: Instructor resources, production and cinematography assignments.
May suit: THTRFLM 1FT3 and ARTHIST 2FA3.
Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
This is an openly–licensed online four–semester college music theory textbook. It differs from other music theory textbooks by focusing less on four–part (SATB) voiceleading and more on relating harmony to the phrase. Also, in traditional music theory textbooks, there is little emphasis on motivic analysis and analysis of melodic units smaller than the phrase. In Music Theory for the 21st–Century Classroom, students learn about motive, fragment, phrase, and subphrase, as well as types of melodic alteration like inversion, intervallic change, augmentation, diminution, rhythmic change, ornamentation, extension, and retrograde.
Includes: Videos lessons, audio, practice exercises (with answers), homework assignments, and practice tests.
May suit: MUSIC 1CR3/1CB3/2CA3/2CB3.
Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context
Resonances: Engaging Music in Its Cultural Context offers a fresh curriculum for the college-level music appreciation course. The musical examples are drawn from classical, popular, and folk traditions from around the globe. These examples are organized into thematic chapters, each of which explores a particular way in which human beings use music. Topics include storytelling, political expression, spirituality, dance, domestic entertainment, and more. The chapters and examples can be taught in any order, making Resonances a flexible resource that can be adapted to your teaching or learning needs.
Includes: Videos/songs (QR codes), and instructor resources (PowerPoint slides and test banks).
May suit: MUSIC 2CU3.
Music and the Child
This book explores a holistic, artistic, and integrated approach to understanding the developmental connections between music and children. This book guides professionals to work through music, harnessing the processes that underlie music learning, and outlining developmentally appropriate methods to understand the role of music in children’s lives through play, games, creativity, and movement. Additionally, the book explores ways of applying music-making to benefit the whole child, i.e., socially, emotionally, physically, cognitively, and linguistically.
Includes: Chapter summaries, examples, activities, and vocabulary.
May suit: MUSIC 2MT3/2MU3.
Brass Techniques and Pedagogy, 2nd Edition
Brass Techniques and Pedagogy is intended to serve as a guide for the band music educator. The text is written with the non-brass playing music education student in mind and focuses on developing beginning levels of brass technique alongside a more expansive understanding of brass fundamentals and pedagogy. While a basic level of technical proficiency will be developed throughout this text, the ability to teach beginning to intermediate brass players effectively with sound pedagogy is the primary purpose of this text.
Includes: Exercises, videos, tips (common issues), summaries, practice material, and instructor resources (guided practice lessons, fingering charts, etc.).
May suit: MUSIC 3K03/4K03.
Music in World Cultures
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.
Includes: Examples, and videos.
May suit: MUSIC 2A03.
Sight-Reading for Guitar: The Keep Going Method Book and Video Series
Sight-Reading for Guitar: The Keep Going Method Book and Video Series teaches guitar players from all musical backgrounds to understand, read and play modern staff notation in real time. The Keep Going Method is designed to impart the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for sight-reading with efficiency, fun and encouragement. The skill of sight-reading is a difficult to develop, primarily because it is traditionally taught inefficiently. Further, students encounter high levels of emotional discomfort in the beginning stages of skill acquisition. The method in this book is designed to impart the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for sight-reading with efficiency, clarity and encouragement. All types of guitars apply: electric, steel-string and nylon-string.
Includes: Videos, play-along exercises and compositions.
May suit: MUSIC 4M03.
Fundamentals, Function, and Form
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.
Includes: Examples with embedded audio and sheet music, interactive activities (with hints and answers), and summaries.
May suit: MUSIC 1CB3.
Music LibreTexts
A collection of open textbooks, assignments, and other educational resources on music.
Storytelling on Screen: An Online Playback Theatre Archive and Guidebook
Playback Theatre is a form of community-centered storytelling theater where the audience tells stories, which are then reflected by a company of actors and musicians. Storytelling on Screen: An Online Playback Theatre Archive and Guidebook is an open education resource consisting of a collection of full-length recordings of online Playback Theatre performances, and a 55-page explanatory guidebook. The guidebook, featuring a foreword by Playback Theatre co-founder, Jo Salas, explains the adaptation to online performances and some of the key concepts, roles, and forms involved in online Playback Theatre. The resource as a whole is suitable for a wide range of theatre students in courses such as applied theatre, theatre for social justice, improvisation, theatre appreciation, or acting.
Includes: Recordings and transcript of performances, and examples.
May suit: THTRFLM 2AA3/2DP3/3PS3 and IARTS 2AD3/2DE3.
Film Appreciation
Film Appreciation is an open educational resource which was developed with funding from an Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant. Film professors and students have reviewed and contributed to the material explored in this OER.
Includes: Videos, and examples.
May suit: THTRFLM 2BB3/2FA3/3VS3, IARTS 2BB3/2FA3 and ARTHIST 2FA3.
Interpreting Love Narratives in East Asian Literature and Film
This book explores the role of traditional East Asian worldviews, ethical values, and common practices in the shaping of East Asian narratives in literature and film. It offers a specific method for this analysis. The interpretive goal is to arrive at interpretations that more accurately engage cultural information so that narratives are understood more closely in terms of their native cultural rather than that of the reader/interpreter. Current neuroscience related to processes of perception and the attribution of meaning form the basis for the theory of interpretation offered in the first half of the volume.
Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema
A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say.
Includes: Videos.
May suit: THTRFLM 2BB3/3PC3/3P03, IARTS 2BB3 and GENDRST 3BB3.
360 Essentials: A Beginner’s Guide to Immersive Video Storytelling
The multimedia instructors, researchers and content producers based at Toronto Metropolitan University noticed an interest in 360 video and virtual reality skyrocket in recent years and some amazing content being created. They have been exploring and experimenting with 360-degree video, photography and spatial audio recording, and figuring out how these elements can be used to create incredible, immersive experiences. The objective with this resource is to walk you through the essential steps in creating compelling and engaging 360 video experiences. While some prior experience with photography or videography can help, the technology available now gives anybody the ability to produce this type of amazing content.
Includes: Examples (videos), and summaries.
May suit: THTRFLM 2FA3, IARTS 2FA3 and ARTHIST 2FA3.
Transforming Stories, Driving Change
A workbook for bringing new voices into public debate based on the performance creation approach developed by Transforming Stories, Driving Change.
Includes: Activities, and exercises.
May suit: THTRFLM 3VS3.
An Introduction to Technical Theatre
An Introduction to Technical Theatre draws on the author’s experience in both the theatre and the classroom over the last 30 years. Intended as a resource for both secondary and post-secondary theatre courses, this text provides a comprehensive overview of technical theatre, including terminology and general practices.
May suit: THTRFLM 2FA3, IARTS 2FA3 and ARTHIST 2FA3.
An American Playgoer in London
Over forty-plus years, Joseph Donohue spent many days in London libraries researching theatrical subjects and many afternoons and evenings in London theatres, witnessing almost one hundred twenty-five productions of original plays and revivals and recording his experience in a series of meticulously kept journals. This chronicle of West End and fringe performance sets down the perceptions of a lifelong American theatregoer who over time made London almost a second home. The result, documented in these pages, amounts to an account of the London theatre over decades of sometimes turbulent social change and artistic advancement. It is a history informed by a lifetime of study and teaching of ancient, Renaissance, modern, and post-modern plays and their vital theatrical dimensions. The focus lies centrally on the individual character of each production, embracing the action of the play, the quality of the acting and other production values, and the ideas that give shape and purpose to the dramatist’s self-imposed task.
May suit: THTRFLM 3FF3/3U03.
An American Playgoer at Home
An American Playgoer at Home serves as a companion volume to An American Playgoer in London. It captures the author’s theatregoing on his home territory in Northampton and Amherst, Massachusetts, in Hartford, Connecticut, in New York City, and in other places in the USA and in Canada as well. As a companion volume it covers approximately the same period of roughly four decades, from the early 1970s into the second decade of the new century. Almost all of the reviews are of live theatre; a few are of films that have an important dramatic quality or are a film version of an existing play, as in the instance of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.
May suit: THTRFLM 3DD3/3U03.
Theatre and Film LibreTexts
A collection of open textbooks, assignments, and other educational resources on theatre and film.
Reframing Art History
Reframing Art History, an open-access multimedia art history “textbook,” gives you a guided journey through the living, breathing, meaningful side of art history. With chapters developed by a group of more than 40 experts, it showcases art and history from the bottom up.
Includes: Videos, essays, key terms, and instructor resources (teaching webinars).
May suit: ARTHIST 2B03/2I03/2Y03/2Z03/4X03.
Smart History
Art has the power to transform lives and to build understanding across cultures. Smarthistory’s free, award-winning digital content unlocks the expertise of hundreds of leading scholars, making the history of art accessible and engaging to more people, in more places, than any other provider.
Includes: Videos.
Guide to Ancient Roman Art
May suit: ARTHIST 2C03 and GKROMST 2C03.
Guide to Ancient Greek Art
May suit: ARTHIST 2B03 and GKROMST 2B03.
Guide to Italian Art in the 1300s
May suit: ARTHIST 2I03.
Guide to Italian Art in the 1400s
May suit: ARTHIST 2I03/3I03.
Introduction to Art: Design, Context and Meaning
Introduction to Art: Design, Context, and Meaning offers a comprehensive introduction to the world of Art. Authored by four USG faculty members with advance degrees in the arts, this textbooks offers up-to-date original scholarship. It includes over 400 high-quality images illustrating the history of art, its technical applications, and its many uses.Combining the best elements of both a traditional textbook and a reader, it introduces such issues in art as its meaning and purpose; its meaning and purpose; its structure, material, and form; and its diverse effects on our lives. Available in Japanese.
Includes: Key concepts, end-of-chapter questions (test yourself), and key terms.
Introduction to Art
This course is called Introduction to Art. It might better be called Introduction to Visual Culture because that is what we are all engaged with from the moment we wake up until the end of our day. This class is intended to make you more visually sensitive to the world around you and to begin to understand your own aesthetic tastes and to seek out things that give you visual pleasure.
Includes: Key points, and key terms.
The Bright Continent: African Art History
This book aims to act as your map through the world of African art. As such, it will help you define the competencies you need to develop–visual analysis, research, noting what information is critical, asking questions, and writing down your observations–and provide opportunities for you to practice these skills until you are proficient. It will also expose you to new art forms and the worlds that produced them, enriching your understanding and appreciation.
Includes: Exercises, videos, and examples.
Art LibreTexts
A collection of open textbooks, assignments, and other educational resources on art.
