What is MITA?

Award-winning professor Robert Winter (UCLA) invites you into a world of music and ideas as diverse as the one we live in. MITA weaves together cultural contexts, sound-drenched explanations of hundreds of musical terms, and world-class recordings with graded interactive guides spanning the entirety of Western classical music (plus blues, jazz, popular, and many global styles). Joined by custom videos featuring respected scholars and dozens of talented student musicians, Winter leads novices and experts alike through a groundbreaking digital learning environment guaranteed to deepen and enrich your real-life relationship with music.

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

AN EVENTFUL STORY: Relevant and engaging

Highlights of An Eventful Story

Fun to Read

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

Thorough

Acquaint yourself with 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).

Integrated

Click the “Play” icon to hear the work under discussion while you read, or choose “Listening Guide” or “Score” for deeper resources. Jump seamlessly back and forth. Musical concepts and challenging English vocabulary link directly to the Deep Glossary.

Modern and Outward-Looking

Alongside Western art music, explore jazz and popular music. Plus, get to know a variety of world music traditions via intimate video encounters with gifted performers.

Smartly Illustrated

Click on in-text thumbnails to view hundreds of full-screen images and take in the full captions.

Clearly Yet Flexibly Organized

Read all 800+ pages of An Eventful Story “cover to cover” to experience music history chronologically, or approach it through the lens that most interests you, be it composer, geography, or any other of the eight ways to sort. Use MITA’s search function to track down pieces, terms, or whatever word or phrase you’re looking for.

Authoritative

Written by award-winning UCLA Distinguished Professor of Music Robert Winter.

LISTENING GUIDES: 160 recordings accompanied by real-time written explanations

Highlights of Listening Guides

World-Class Recordings

MITA teems with performances by the best of the best, from the Berlin Philharmonic to the Takacs Quartet, from Dame Joan Sutherland to Sir Georg Solti.

Interactive Design

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

Vocal Texts Made Intelligible

For vocal works, the Listening Guides include both the original language and custom “sense” English translations (rather than misleading “singing” translations).

Depth

MITA’s Listening Guides include detailed background and full commentary.

Layered Approach

Most Guides include two toggle-able levels: Level 1 (for relative beginners), requiring you to have no prior musical training, and Level 2 (for more advanced learners), challenging you to connect what you hear to musical ideas and language you already know.

INTERACTIVE SCORES: 130 annotated scores brought to life

Highlights of Interactive Scores

Bouncing Blocks

As the music plays continuously, MITA’s interactive bouncing blocks guide novices and experts alike through the written music. It’s easy to notice the relationships between what you hear in the recording and what you see on the page—even if you don’t read music (trust us!).

Interactive Navigation

Click anywhere on a page to hear the music from exactly that point. 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).

Supercharged Introductions

Each score opens with an enlightening overview and a map of the piece’s sections.

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.

You’re in Control

Want to just silently read or listen to a score on your own? With a single click turn off the commentary and bouncing blocks and have at it.

DEEP GLOSSARY: A unique approach to a wealth of terms and ideas

Highlights of the Deep Glossary

Multimedia Richness

Don't just read definitions: hear them! In-text “Play” buttons illustrate written concepts. Hundreds of textual pop-ups tell you exactly what you’re hearing when you hear it.

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, and works referenced are linked back to “An Eventful Story.”

Depth, on Your Terms

We meant it when we named it the “Deep” Glossary. Many entries offer extended essays with further suggestions for more reading. But each entry starts with a simple barebones definition if that’s all you need.

Help with English, Too

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

PATHWAYS: Powerfully connect MITA’s four sections

Highlights of Pathways

The Media You Need, When You Need Them

MITA is already unique for its all-in-one integration of music, words, notation, images, and video. Pathways help you get quickly oriented within a vast content universe by combining resources from throughout MITA and presenting them in Pathways organized as logical learning threads rather than by media type.

A Variety of Lenses

Find helpful brief and expanded pre-made Pathways such as “Orchestra,” “American Music,” “Music and Religion.” Or try your hand at “1-Semester Music Appreciation Plan” for novices, or “2-Semester Music History Plan” for university-level music students.

Tested and True Premade Pathways

Our content team—expert and experienced university-level music faculty—have designed MITA’s Pathways to maximize learning (and enjoyment!).

Become the Teacher

Pathways weave together all the resources you need to give a compelling presentation to a group of friends or for a music club or outreach event.

Head Down the Rabbit Hole with MITA

There are lots of bright, curious people who want to open their minds to the vibrant world of music but are unsure about where to start or uneasy engaging in its conversations. MITA seeks to democratize the classical music world by bringing you to a place of confidence and deeper enjoyment in your musical journey.

Learn Music through Sounds

Before there was music history or music theory, there was the music itself. MITA’s philosophy prioritizes sound as the central element in the learning experience, with real pieces and strategic audio illustrations integrated directly into the text. You’ll never have to imagine what something sounds like. Just press “Play.”

Follow Built-In Structures

The historical accounts within MITA can be read sequentially—which is to say from the dawn of Western music in ancient Greece until the extraordinary global musical diversity of today—in a way that both entertains and enlightens, saturated throughout with sounds and images. If you want to expand your musical vocabulary, follow the glossary’s Musical Languages Guide, which starts with essays on the most basic terms (e.g. “music,” “rhythm”) and builds from there. MITA’s built-in structure provides guidance informed by our team members’ combined 100+ years of experience as teachers (and learners!).

Or, Customize to Your Own Liking

If you know what you want, skip the built-in structures altogether and use MITA’s powerful sorting features to make the experience yours. The search feature allows you to find all mentions of any term within the program. An Eventful Story can be accessed eight different ways (chronologically, geographically, by composer, etc.), and most Listening Guides can be set to novice or advanced levels.

Grasp Ideas in Plain, Memorable Terms

MITA places historical and theoretical notions within cultural contexts that are truthful and make no attempt to conceal paradoxes or contradictions. The narrative relates music to everyday ideas, so you don’t need to be a theory guru to wrap your head around them. Making connections to ideas you already own has been shown repeatedly to be the best predictor of what you retain.

Discover Musical Scores as Never Before

Whether you’ve never read a note of music or logged years of theory as a music student, MITA brings a whole new level of engagement with its Interactive Scores. They don’t just stare back at you—every bar, phrase, and theme plays for you on command, guided by MITA’s interactive bouncing blocks. Optional annotations provide insights about each score’s most revealing dimensions, with terms linked to the Deep Glossary.

For Lifelong Learners and Newbies Alike

MITA is used as a textbook in formal music appreciation and history courses and as such offers a depth of coverage to rival comprehensive adult and continuing education courses in music, in a joyful environment and at a fraction of the cost. Because MITA is organized in layers, it suits learners across various levels: just choose how deep you’d like to dive. Our team has been developing easy-to-use multimedia learning tools for people at all levels of familiarity with computers since 1989.

Prepare for Live Experiences

Fostering a passion for live music is central to the mission of ArtsInteractive. MITA can help you make the most of your live listening experience. If you’re going to hear a piece of music that’s in MITA, well, you know what to do (ahem, check out the Eventful Story overview, Listening Guide, and Interactive Score). If the piece isn’t in MITA, you can still prepare profitably by immersing yourself in the cultural movements on which your piece draws.

Join the Conversation

The more you learn about music, the more you become part of its living community. It’s not about impressing people by dropping in the right term during a lull in the conversation. It’s about being able to communicate your passion to others, and to hear theirs in return. It’s about confronting the relationships between music and power, about debating whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism stains his music, or arguing whether the hip-hop of resistance has become overly commodified. Music matters because it cannot help but reflect where a culture is or predict where it’s going.

Embrace the Spirit of Music!

It's sometimes hard to explain to others why we need music, which on the surface seems to serve little concrete purpose. Yet for millennia humans have acknowledged its central importance to creating community and cultural identity, its unique ability to both console and to challenge. Music continues to elicit a wider range of responses and engagement than any other form of human expression. Within that framework MITA strives to constantly expand your field of vision.

Get MITA

Want to take MITA for a test drive first? Download the free MITA Sampler for a limited look at MITA’s multi-dimensional approach to musical learning.