Introducing MITA, the Digital Un-Textbook

What Is MITA?

MITA's four integrated sections facilitate a multi-dimensional approach to discovering music and put game-changing tools in the hands of educators and students:

An Eventful Story | Listening Guides | Interactive Scores | Deep Glossary

AN EVENTFUL STORY: Relevance and range

Highlights of An Eventful Story

Fun to Read

Students make sense of music’s stories by learning about their rich cultural contexts, often tied to everyday concepts (like baseball!).

Thorough

Explore all of Western music's major movements and composers, from the Middle Ages to Minimalism, from Hildegard of Bingen (born 1098) to John Adams (born 1947).

Modern and Outward-Looking

Alongside Western art music, An Eventful Story features popular music and a growing collection of global musics, the latter through intimate video encounters with gifted performers.

Integrated

Clicking the “Play” icon starts the work under discussion, from right within Eventful Story, while choosing “Listening Guide” or “Score” launches deeper resources. Students jump seamlessly back and forth. Musical concepts and challenging English vocabulary link directly to the Deep Glossary.

Sortable Eight Different Ways

Find what you are looking for through the lenses that most apply to you, including chronology, composer, genre, geography, and more.

Smartly Illustrated

Clicking on in-text thumbnails brings up hundreds of full-screen images and full captions.

LISTENING GUIDES: More than 150 prose accounts linked to sounding music

Highlights of Listening Guides

Interactive Design

Bouncing blocks take students of all levels through each section of every piece. To hear any location (“Closing area,” for example), students simply click on it, and voila.

World-Class Recordings

MITA teems with performances by world-class artists, from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Takacs Quartet, from Dame Joan Sutherland to Sir Georg Solti.

Vocal Texts Made Intelligible

For all vocal works, the Listening Guides include both the original language and a smart-sense English translation.

Depth

MITA includes an unrivaled set of over 150 Listening Guides that offer detailed background information and full commentary.

Layered Approach

Most Guides include two toggle-able levels: Level 1, assuming no prior musical training, and Level 2, challenging more advanced learners to connect what they hear to musical ideas and language they already know.

INTERACTIVE SCORES: Over 120 annotated scores brought to life

Highlights of Interactive Scores

Bouncing Blocks

As the music plays continuously, MITA’s trademark bouncing blocks guide novices and experts alike through each bar of more than a hundred scores.

Supercharged Introductions

Each score includes a detailed overview of what’s in it. Clicking on any location from the overview instantly brings up that location in the score and starts playing; shift+click starts anywhere in the music while staying on the overview.

Insightful Annotations

Easily readable red text points out the most salient features on each page. Musical terms are linked to their Deep Glossary entries. Clicking “More” on the bottom of many pages delves even deeper into what the music reveals.

Interactive Functionality

Clicking on any bar plays the music from exactly that point: great for examining details or even practicing sight-singing.

Navigation Made Easy

Students can go through a score page by page, jump to a specific page number, or click on “Go To” to play from a specific moment in the piece (“Coda,” for example).

Total Control

Want students to just silently read or listen to a score on their own? They can turn off the commentary and bouncing blocks with a single click and have at it.

DEEP GLOSSARY: A unique approach to over 600 musical terms

Highlights of the Deep Glossary

Multimedia Richness

Students don't just read definitions: they hear them! In-text “Play” buttons illustrate written concepts. Hundreds of textual “pop-ups” give them a play-by-play of exactly what they are hearing.

Helpful Ordering

An alphabetical index is supplemented by a “Musical Languages Guide” that builds knowledge step-by-step, from the most basic concepts (“music”) to the most advanced (“modified strophic form” or “disability studies”).

Dynamic Linking

Terms found in each definition are themselves linked to their own definitions (with an easy retrace), and works referenced are linked back to “An Eventful Story.”

“Deep” Means “Deep”

Many entries offer extended essays with further suggestions for “More Reading.”

Help with English, Too

Straightforward definitions for over 1000 challenging non-musical English words. Every word includes an audio pronunciation.

Designed By and For Educators

 

“Robert Winter’s masterful and profoundly original MITA represents the first thorough rethinking in music pedagogy in many decades. It will set the standard for a very long time into the future. The interactive nature of the program is as extraordinary (and duly attentive to how learning occurs) as the scholarship is authoritative.”

Richard Leppert
Regent’s Professor of Music
University of Minnesota

Our team understands educators and musicians because—from our principal author to our director of programming—that’s who we are! Our experience in higher-ed music education has informed every step of MITA’s development in order to give educators like you the tools we always wished we had:

Everything at Your Fingertips

Discovering music should be elegant, intuitive, and easy on the back. A powerful one-stop platform serves as textbook, music scores, sound recordings, and more. You and your students will never need to interrupt learning to find a page, a piece, or a track.

A Comprehensive Story, Enhanced

MITA’s An Eventful Story traces the history of Western and selected world musics in an accessible and engaging manner. But it does much more: music jumps straight from the text, illustrating key points; thumbnail illustrations go full screen with detailed captions; more than 2,000 terms link directly to the Deep Glossary; and links to external reading provide ideas for supplementary assignments (or just feed curious students’ minds). An Eventful Story links seamlessly (both to and back from) MITA’s three other main sections.

Carefully Chosen Repertoire

MITA’s repertoire is both representative and fresh—works that appeal to the ear while being eminently teachable. From Hildegard to Harbison, plainchant to Puccini, Monteverdi to Messaien and Madonna (including some delightful sidetrips), China to the Middle East, MITA covers the waterfront.

Low Cost

At $12.95/mo., with discounts for longer-term subscriptions, MITA brings unparalleled resources at prices students can afford. MITA saves one-semester music appreciation students up to 82% compared to new versions of leading music appreciation textbooks. It saves up to 48% compared to rentals—and without the logistical hassle. Check out the full range of prices on our Subscriptions page. Instructor copies of MITA are provided free of charge when you adopt MITA for your course in the Adopt MITA tab.

Flexibility

MITA delivers a multi-layered experience that only computers can offer. Finding the right level for your students is both easy and flexible. Lesson and assignment planning allows you to sort by date, periods, composers, styles, repertoire, genres, and regions. Assign listenings with either novice or advanced annotations. Oscillate freely between history, theory, and performance. MITA is at home in the music appreciation hall and the graduate seminar, the theory classroom and the course in orchestration.

Any Student Can Read a Score

MITA’s 4,000 pages of breakthrough Interactive Scores bring notation to sounding life. As the music plays, novices and experts alike enjoy following along with the bouncing blocks that guide them through a work. Users can also jump instantly from section to section to demonstrate structural parallels. Optional annotations explore musical concepts in their detailed contexts. With a single click turn the annotations off to create your own reading.

A Glossary You Can Hear, and Plan Around

Essays (always headed by basic definitions suitable for beginners) accompanied by well-chosen musical examples and guided visual pop-ups breathe sound and clarity into hundreds of theoretical terms. Terms linked from within MITA’s Eventful Story and Listening Guides offer the rare opportunity to reinforce history with theory, performance with both. Additionally, the Deep Glossary’s concise definitions of challenging English words help ESL students quickly build vocabulary.

Search Quickly, Precisely

Planning a lesson on all-things Brahms? Can’t remember where that reference to Miles Davis was? Use MITA’s powerful search engine to access instantly every mention of a term from a contextualized list.

Great Performers, Great Performances

MITA teems with performances by world-class artists—from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Takacs Quartet, Dame Joan Sutherland to Sir Georg Solti—as well as video explorations of more than 100 Western and world instruments performed largely by students. Annotated links to more than 350 external videos provide access and illumination about even more performances of high quality.

A Global, Contemporary Perspective

In Version 1.0 students have access to original custom videos of traditional music from China and the Middle East, as well as an engaging video introduction to world music studies by UCLA Professor Emeritus Anthony Seeger. Fresh cultures are in the pipeline. Traditional instruments from the Hawaiian ukulele to Scottish bagpipes highlight the manner in which Western music has borrowed freely from many cultures and traditions. Popular music is integrated from the Middle Ages to the present.

Reliability

MITA has been programmed and packaged with educators and students in mind. All audio and video is streamed from our reliable servers (you must be connected to the internet to use the program). With MITA’s high-resolution file compression, resources are easily delivered over your home or institution’s Wi-Fi network, or even using a smartphone hotspot.

Always Evolving

Guided by its mission to engender lasting curiosity about music, MITA remains an agile, perpetual work-in-progress. MITA’s development team will roll out new features and additional repertoire on a regular basis, as well as respond to user input. If we are in error, we’ll fix it quickly. We welcome your thoughts and suggestions. Drop us your comments on the contact page, and sign up for our emails to be the first to know when new features and repertoire are released.

Trustworthy Quality

ArtsInteractive’s team of musicians and educators boasts more than one hundred years of combined experience in higher-ed and self-learner music education. Principal author Robert Winter is an award-winning UCLA teacher, scholar, and performer. Designer/programmer Peter Bogdanoff’s interactive work has inspired audiences from the Pacific Symphony to the New York Philharmonic. Senior Educational Liaison Robert Freeman is the former dean of the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and the University of Texas at Austin. We are passionate pioneers in digital media who have earned praise from Wired, The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, The New York Times, and Newsweek, and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Questions Frequently Asked by Educators

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Adopt MITA for Your Course

If you’re ready to adopt MITA for use in an academic course, complete the form below to receive a complimentary instructor copy to use throughout the duration of your course. Now through November 30, in celebration of MITA’s launch, we’re offering your students annual subscriptions at just $99.95 (vs. $124.95 regular price). Students can select an annual, monthly ($12.95), or 6-month ($64.95) option on our Subscriptions page. Thanks for choosing MITA!

Get MITA for Your Library

MITA makes a great addition to library workstations and downloadable resources available to patrons online. Contact us about special bulk rates available to public libraries and those affiliated with educational institutions.