Music in the Air (MITA) is the first wholly integrated, all-digital music teaching platform ever to hit the higher ed market. Overflowing with the sounds of music played and sung by world-class performers, MITA offers a refreshing alternative to traditional textbooks for multi-semester music-major history sequences as well as introductory non-major courses.

Unify Course Resources

Gone are the days when teachers and students had to navigate between a separate textbook, listening resources, and score anthology. With MITA, all that and more is offered under one roof: world-class recordings, a joyful and authoritative historical narrative, our signature Interactive Scores, original video content, and expandable images. MITA, a robust Mac/Windows application, also serves as a home base for excursions to the web, with curated, annotated links to web resources added to the mix.

Bridge the Gap Between History, Theory, and Performance

MITA acts upon the growing consensus of the college music community: music history and theory feed on one another. For that reason, every mention of a musical concept, from monophony to Tristan chord, is hotlinked to an in-depth glossary essay on the topic. Glossary entries are saturated with musical examples and link back to the historical narratives of those works.

Bring It All Together

We’re passionate about providing educators with content that is deep but highly accessible. That’s why we’ve rolled out Pathways. Pathways offer a wide range of guided threads through MITA’s rich resources and include complete course syllabi, traditional genres overviews, extensive and entertaining introductions to musical instruments, and many other topics.

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

A Comprehensive Story, Enhanced

Linked seamlessly with MITA’s three other main sections, 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; and links to external reading provide ideas for supplementary assignments (or just food for curious students’ minds).

Better Listening

In rich Listening Guides, bouncing blocks guide students around every musical corner. To hear any passage, students simply click on it, and voila. MITA’s guides are written by lead author Robert Winter, offering a level of depth and authority unrivaled by any other textbook.

The Right Level

Finding the right level for your students’ varying abilities and backgrounds is easy with MITA’s multi-layered approach. Instructors choose the level of cultural and historical context, musical terminology, and degree of contact with sounding music.

Powerful Planning

Use MITA’s pre-built Pathways (or, coming soon, make your own!). Eight Tables of Contents allow you to sort by date, periods, composers, styles, repertoire, genres, and regions. A fast, powerful Search instantly links you to all mentions of any word(s)—composers, instruments, harmonies, music concepts, etc.

The Score, Like Never Before

MITA’s 4,000 pages of breakthrough Interactive Scores bring notation to sounding life. Students are guided by bouncing blocks synchronized to world-class recordings and can jump from section to section to instantly hear structural parallels. Annotations can be turned on and off, and optional “More” buttons offer additional commentary.

Glossary Brought to Sounding Life

Concise definitions and full-length essays accompanied by well-chosen musical examples and synchronized text pop-ups breathe sound and clarity into hundreds of musical concepts. Additionally, the Deep Glossary’s concise definitions of challenging English words help ESL students quickly build vocabulary.

MITA’s carefully selected repertoire features a broad range of works that appeal to the ear while being eminently teachable. From Hildegard to Hindemith, plainchant to Puccini, Monteverdi to Morton, China to country, MITA covers the waterfront.

A Global, Contemporary Perspective

Students have access to original videos of traditional music from China, the Middle East, and Bulgaria. In addition, an engaging video series wth UCLA Professor Emeritus Anthony Seeger provides an introduction to world music studies. 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.

Coverage of Western Impacts on Global and Indigenous Cultures

The story of an incredible body of predominantly European music would be incomplete without confronting the ugly truths of colonialism. While examining European conquests in which musicians sometimes found themselves caught in the middle or even direct perpetrators, MITA explores important contributions by members of historically marginalized groups such as women, indigenous peoples, and cultures on the vast African continent.

Celebrate Female Musicians

MITA gives strong voice throughout to the crucial and ongoing contributions of women. With a wide-ranging lineup that includes Hildegard, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Ma Rainey, Julia Wolfe, Missy Mazzoli, and many others, students are introduced to the enduring influence—too often against entrenched resistance—of women in music.

College textbook prices have ballooned in recent years, rising from 2006 to 2016 at a rate four times faster than inflation. ArtsInteractive does not believe that cost should ever be a barrier to your students’ ability to obtain top-quality course materials.

Low Cost

At $50 per semester, MITA brings unparalleled resources at prices students can afford. MITA is a whopping 66% less expensive than new versions of leading music history textbooks for two-semester history students. It’s 44% less expensive than rentals—and without logistical hassles. Instructor copies of MITA are provided free of charge when you adopt MITA for your course.

Trustworthy Scholarship

ArtsInteractive’s team of musicians and educators boasts more than one hundred years of combined experience in higher-ed and self-learner music education. Lead 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 storied former dean of the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and the University of Texas at Austin. Our pioneering work in educational digital media has earned praise in Wired, The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, The New York Times, and Newsweek, as well as funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Great Performers, Great Performances

There is nothing MIDI about MITA. We are built around performances by world-class artists, from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Takacs Quartet, Renée Fleming to Sir Georg Solti. Recordings from Universal Music Group’s authoritative catalogue serve as the foundation for straight-through listening as well as thousands of timely excerpts.