ABOUT THE COLLECTION

I believe that educational resources should be shared widely for the benefit of society. This page contains resources I use in my music classes.

This collection was also published in 2018 under editorial review in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy.

** Before you download, please see the Update about Open Music Theory Version 2, below!

Creative Commons License

Unless otherwise stated, all materials hosted and linked on this Class Resources section of my website are copyright © 2017 by Kyle Gullings and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. I encourage others to use, share, edit, and build upon these materials, and to contact me to inform me about any such uses. Please include the following attribution anywhere the materials are posted:

Created by composer and educator Kyle Gullings, www.kylegullings.com.

While inherently modular, editable, and adaptable to multiple theoretical and curricular approaches, these materials are designed to align with the topics found in the free online “text”book Open Music Theory Version 1. OMT was built on resources authored by Kris Shaffer, Bryn Hughes, and Brian Moseley, edited by Kris Shaffer and Robin Wharton, and published by Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing.

My original stand-alone collection contains 109 documents, including:

  • 73 worksheets (35 unique topical worksheets, 1, 2, or 3 versions of each [usually 2], to allow for both practice and graded assignments)
  • 16 larger projects (12 literature analysis, and 4 original composition)
  • 16 exams (8 unique topical exams, 2 versions of each, to allow for both practice and graded exams)
  • 4 syllabi

All documents are presented in PDF format. Additionally, to encourage remixing, they are also given in their original formats – either DOCX (Word), or MUSX (Finale notation) with accompanying XML (digital sheet music interchange and distribution format). Again, please feel free to use, share, edit, and build upon these materials (with appropriate attribution and subsequent licensing), and let me know how you’re using them!

In many cases (indicated by highlighting in the documents), I have omitted audio links, scores, and lyrics from these materials, due to copyright restrictions. In these cases, instructors are encouraged to seek out and include the specified works, or alternate works of their choosing, for educational use.

Update: I am a co-author of Open Music Theory Version 2, which represents a significant expansion of the original Open Music Theory resource. I incorporated most of my original worksheets (above) into this Version 2 Workbook, along with dozens of other new sheets created in collaboration with other OMT2 authors. While you are welcome to download and use my original collection, I highly recommend you visit OMT2 for the most complete, up-to-date, remix-friendly versions of all the worksheets.