Welcome to Music in the Air—or MITA, as
many hundreds of UCLA students know it. I’m
Robert Winter, MITA’s lead author, and I’d
love to take you on a brief tour of our teaching
and learning platform. We think you’ll appreciate
not just its richness and depth, but also
its flexibility and accessibility.
By the way, this is it—there is no heavy
textbook, no cumbersome volumes of scores,
no separate Listening Guides, or Video Resources,
or Study Guides. It’s all right here—both
for you and your students.
MITA is built from the ground up around four
closely interrelated sections, with a fifth
section, Pathways, that provides shortcuts
for both beginners and teachers to explore
specific topics.
We’ll look first at the four main sections,
beginning with “An Eventful Story”—a
phrase we use to replace the drier and more
abstract “history.” MITA relates European
and American stories within a rich global
context.
Second, more than 160 prose Listening Guides
feature world-class performances from the
catalogues of Deutsche Gramophon, Decca, London,
Philips, Oiseaux Lyre, Archiv, and many others.
Each Guide offers a separate novice and expert
layer using MITA’s unique bouncing blocks—we’ll
see these in action shortly.
The Interactive Scores use the same bouncing
blocks, and this allows beginners as well as
trained musicians to explore more than 4,000
pages of music notation from the Middle Ages
to the present.
Finally, the more than 2,000 terms in our
Deep Glossary insure, first, that students
either reading English as a second language
or those with reading deficiencies will get
the help they need to read at a college level.
It’s also the place where more than a thousand
music-related terms are both explained concisely
and explored in depth.
You can, of course, return to this Home Page
anytime by clicking on the Home icon in the
lower left hand corner, and you can explore
each of these sections from their own Tables
of Contents. But as you’ll soon see, once
you’re inside of MITA, you’ll be naturally
oscillating between sections from links right
on your current pages.
Let’s see how these sections work together
by selecting An Eventful Story. Its eight—and
see the tabs across the top here—its eight different means of organizing and accessing the material within
MITA is a first. We’ll explore them one
at a time.
Let’s start with the most traditional—Periods
and Chapters. I’m going to select the Late
Baroque and Chapter 7: Concertos, Suites,
and More.
Throughout MITA you can use the arrow key to page forward,
page backward. But there's a MITA shortcut,
which allows you simply to use the right and left
arrow keys on your keyboard
and that’s what I’ll be using.
By the way, you hold that key down, you can
beat a Tesla going from 0 to 60.
So I'll go right back to where we started here.
You’ll first see a discussion of late Baroque
style …. then the concerto grosso …. before
we encounter Arcangelo Corelli. All of MITA’s
1,200 carefully curated images enlarge to
Full Window, with plenty of space for generous
captions. To put the image away, click anywhere
in the image Window …. So we read about Corelli’s
concerti grossi …. and then we’re
ready for an exploration of a complete work—No.
2 from that same opus.
The discussions of pieces in An Eventful Story
are accompanied by audio excerpts that illustrate
the concept under direct consideration. Throughout
MITA you simply click once on any PLAY button
to start the music; to pause, click the Space Bar; to
Resume, click again. It’s that simple. When
you’re in the middle of teaching it’s
nice to have to find only the largest and
handiest key on the keyboard. So, for example,
this “sparkling passage work in thirds,”
or … this buoyant “stereophonic effect.”
In An Eventful Story, each time you start an
excerpt a handy Player shows up on the bottom
right of the lower Control Panel. You can
jump ahead, move back, do any of the things
that you would do on a normal Player.
Assuming we’ve now taken the discussion
all in, we’re now ready for the Listening
Guide linked at the very head here.
The first page provides information and context
for the guide that follows. MITA’s Listening
Guides contain two layers, a first layer here for the
beginner or novice
and a second layer for someone who's had musical 
training or is a music major, for example.
You can toggle between them while
the music plays.
And here is where MITA really shines. Along
with the Location and the Comments, each timing
that you see is its own precise Play area,
so you can listen to a piece or section either
watching the block move automatically ….
or else you can take matters into your own
hands, for example, and compare the beginning
of the first section to the beginning
of the second section.
Students will learn about “down a fourth”
real fast this way.
Have you, by the way, ever wondered how the
leading history of Western music textbooks
can be more than a thousand pages long and
scarcely mention terms like “sequence”
or “contrary motion,” much less “diminished
seventh chord” or “augmented sixth chord”,
or “Neapolitan sixth chord”?
That’s kind of like learning about basketball
without terms such as “fast break” or
“zone defense” or “3 pointer.”
To start with, let’s look at “sequence”
using MITA’s Deep Glossary. First I’m
going to switch from our current “Blocks”
to “Links.” You’ll now see a lot of
blue linked text.
You can simply hover over a term to get a basic 
definition, or if you want to delve deeper you
can click on it, which brings up the
Glossary Window.
The words are again reinforced by audio examples
that bring the concept to life—but this
time with an added dimension. As the example
plays, text pops up to guide
the student. That's what this “plus” means.
Or, more than a century later, a compose like
Frederic Chopin used a single dreamy sequence
to actually create a melody.
Your students will now have a rich set of
concrete sounds to attach to the written discussion.
They’ll hear other examples of sequence
much more readily. MITA’s Deep Glossary
contains more than a thousand of these powerful
popups.
Now lets look at something a bit more complicated:
“diminished seventh chord.” So first
let's look at its construction.
And there’s no
better way to explain its power than with
this blast from Bach’s D-minor Toccata
for organ.
If students then listen to this excerpt from
the Wolf's Glen Scene of
Weber’s Der Freischütz, in which
Max's fiancee Agathe appears about
to toss herself into the river,
or this sorrowful segment from 
the Mad Scene in Lucia di Lammermoor,
anyway your students will have a sense
grounded in actual practice of the ways in
which composers gave meaning to this chameleon
chord.
By the way, if you wanted, for example, to find
all the examples in the Scores and Listening
Guides of “augmented sixth chord” notated
as IV6#, all you’d have to do
is go to MITA’s powerful Search, down here with the magnifying glass,
and put in ”iv6#”, and almost as fast as you can blink,
you’ve got 157 results that your students can explore.
OK, so now we’re ready for the Interactive
Score, which I can go to right from
the Listening Guide. Its first
page may give background to the edition that
we use, or discuss certain features that stand
out. The Overview on the right of p. 1 provides
a snapshot of the piece. When I hold down
the Shift key and click on any location,
the music starts automatically from there. If
I release the Shift key and click, say here,
so I'm taken instantly to that location, and
just as quickly the music begins to play.
This combination of speed and precision makes
you a better teacher, and your students better
learners.
At any time, whether the music is playing
or not, I can bring up the “Go To” menu,
which replicates the opening overview,
and go to go to any place that I want to.
Now, you're free to simply turn 
all the annotations off
-- that will take the bouncing block out as well --
or just turn the comments off
and keep the bouncing block.
It's up to you.
Let’s now go back to the Main Menu by clicking
on the Home icon, and then on An Eventful Story.
The second tab brings up the Ten Preludes
containing the contextual essays that set
up the individual music periods. Let’s look
at the very first one and see how, in addition,
of course, to the customary nod to the ancient Greeks,
we have a discussion of the Silk Roads
that the Chinese Han Emperor Wu
opened in 130 BCE, and over which many musical
instruments must have traveled in both directions.
You will also notice four unique Interludes.
These address very directly the impact of
Western exploration, colonization, and exploitation.
The fate of music is caught up in the same
events that resulted in the deaths of millions
of indigenous and enslaved peoples by disease,
or famine, or forced relocation, or military
actions. We cannot either as a globe or a
country get right with each other until we
get right with our history.
Africa Out of History, for example, explores
why Africa—a massive continent with which
Europeans were long familiar—plays virtually
no role in an undergrad Western music education.
The answer lies largely with the great German
philosopher Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Hegel,
who said -- I'm going to jump to page 7 here --
“At this point we leave Africa,
not to mention it again. For it is no historical
part of the World; it has no movement or development
to exhibit,” and so forth.
Of course, instructors are free to
include or omit these Interludes.
By the way, MITA’s history function --
this history window with a clock there --
keeps track of every place that you’ve been,
so you can slide up and down and
find the place that you want to go and
get back to the Tables of Contents if we want to.
And that’s pretty convenient because next
we can look at works by chapter.
Let’s say you’d like to find the
last movement of Mozart’s glorious Jupiter Symphony.
So I’ll click here on Viennese Style, and there it is.
Right there. I’m in the movement now.
see the movement on the right here. Ah hah! Four ideas that more or less govern the movement.
Let’s listen to them: A,
B,
C,
and D.
So I’m now going to go right
to the Score and start in the Coda with that
wonderful inversion of theme A.
And what you’re about to see is something
I’ve taught more than once with
500 non-majors at a shot.
So, we start with two themes,
then three themes, then four themes.
You can see exactly which ones they are,
and it’s great to actually have your class
sing all of the theme A’s, as it migrates up
through the voices in a very systematic way.
So here we go.
If I want to go back and catch that quintuple
invertible counterpoint again, it’s easy.
Ok, I think you get the idea.
Now, let’s go back once again, and this time
to Styles & Topics.
Now, let’s say I’m looking in Romanticism
and I see, ah, “The rise of virtuosity.”
Looks interesting.
So I page through it and run into
my friend, Paganini,
and then into one of his solo violin caprices,
and I can actually then begin to
listen to the kind of virtuosity
that Paganini brought to the 19th Century.
And then those devilish ricochet bowings.
Now we’ll return to our main menu and have a look at
MITA’s historical windows.
These offer a kind of up close,
first-person accounts of musical life during
a particular time. For example, #2 here, “A Choirboy’s
Life at Notre Dame.” It contains a set of rules
that governed these young boys in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. My particular favorite
is Rule 6: “Likewise we wish that one of
the boys should always read during every meal
from some useful book so that they might abstain
from conversation and observe that admonition:
‘to speak few things during a meal.’”
Ah, that’s a fun time.
Now I’ll click again on the Home icon and
return to our series of menus.
Let’s say you want to locate the Biography
of a particular composer.
I’m going to go to the alphabetical listing
and look for, let’s say, Duke Ellington.
And there I see a photograph 
of a young Ellington with his band.
And a little bit later version of his band.
And then I can explore his wonderful 
“Harlem Air Shaft” through its Listening Guide
and show what’s really very interesting:
this A-A-B-A structure to all of these sections.
Not just Beethoven’s Ninth, but it goes back
centuries and centuries.
And it can be shown like this.
So students can teach themselves these
very intricate structures very very quickly.
Or supposing you want to look at particular genres
or categories. Let’s take, for example, opera.
And how about Richard Strauss’s immortal
final trio to “Der Rosenkavalier?”
We can check out the nice digs in which
he wrote this piece,
and then we can also go right to the score,
where over this wonderful A-flat pedal
we get this final buildup.
Now, all throughout MITA, 
in more than 1500 pages actually,
instead of singing translations, which you find
in every piano/vocal score,
we’ve created our own “sense” translations
so that your students will actually
know what’s going on and what
exactly is being said. So, here we go.
By the way, if you want to find out how Strauss
came up with this goose-bump Magic Chord,
you can just click on the “More” and
it’ll talk you through it.
Sense translations can make a huge difference
in a work like Barbara Strozzi’s beautiful
“The Secret Lover,” in which we’ve actually
been able to use her original printed edition.
… hard to turn that off, but it really allows
the student to see what she was really thinking
and how she was setting carefully
each and every word.
And finally, MITA organizes its offerings
by Geographical Regions, so you can see instantly
what Russian, or English, or 
American music is available. But
this section is especially useful for is tracking
traditional musics. Let’s look
at China, and the quzheng. My
colleague Qin Xiao Ning explains to
us exactly what lies at the heart of playing guzheng.
In a more contemporary work, “Fighting the Typhoon,” 
Prof. Qin demonstrates for us the aggressive
strumming style that’s also so central 
to playing guzheng.
Prof. Qin is typical of the accomplished MITA
artists who not only play exceptionally well
but at the same time can unravel the cultural
secrets behind their instruments.
Finally, Pathways is a major new feature that we
are just rolling out. It offers powerful shortcuts
to a wide range of topics. There are many
entry points:
For first timers there is a Welcome to MITA
orientation;
For Educators there are complete course syllabuses.
Here’s how each Pathway works: From the
Languages of Music, I’m going to select
Musical Shapes. Bring it up. When I click on the Glossary
entry for “improvisation,” it pops right up.
I can read it if I wish. But I can also then 
immediately hear an example of a Bach improvisational
style in his Toccata in D Minor,
or just as easily listen to a demonstration video
by jazz pianist Carmen Staff
on how to improvise 12-bar blues.
Returning to Pathways, “Feeling Music” addresses students right where they are.
For example, “Music that Energizes” contains a whole range of very energetic music, from Josquin
in the late 15th Century all the way up through John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” in the 1980s.
Specific Topics are particularly powerful:
“Women in Music” offers a curated, guided
tour through the many dozens of instances
where MITA examines both the manner in which
women have been portrayed and treated throughout
the history of Western music as well as the
pivotal roles that they have always played.
If I move my cursor to the left, a pop-out Index 
lets me choose the Period. I’ll choose Renaissance.
Here, I can read about the strange life and times 
of Lucrezia Borgia;
in Post-Romanticism about the pioneering ethnomusicologists Alice
Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore;
in America about the equally pioneering career 
of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey.
Without Pathways such a richly annotated tour
as this would be virtually impossible.
Well, we’ve barely scratched MITA’s surface,
yet I hope you’ve noticed that the domains of
music history and music theory and performance
never came up; we just did music. We hope
you’ll find it worthwhile to give MITA a
spin on your own. Please check out our website
at: www.artsinteractiveinc.com
Soon, by the way, there’ll be teaching videos
that delve more deeply into each of MITA’s
main sections. In the meantime, though, thanks
for watching.
