Resource: Toby Rush Music Theory
When I woke up this morning, I knew that I needed to write a blog post, and was running through resources that I LOVE that I might not have shared in my head. One of my all-time favorites is titled Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People - created by Toby Rush, an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Technology at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, where he teaches music theory, aural skills, music technology and composition. He also happens to be a GIFTED programmer and graphic designer and the FREE resources that he posts on his site are amazing. If you teach music in middle school, high school or college/university, I highly recommend bookmarking this site right now (if you haven’t already) and start printing out and laminating his materials to either decorate your classroom or hand out to your students.
When you visit the Music Theory section of Toby’s site, you will see about 60+ PDF posters that are free to download. These posters are organized into the following categories: Music Theory Fundamentals, The Common Practice Period: Diatonic Harmony, The Common Practice Period: Development & Form, The Common Practice Period: Chromatic Harmony, Sixteenth Century Counterpoint, The Twentieth Century, and Orchestration. First off, I LOVE Toby’s design ethos. As a comic book fan, I thoroughly enjoy his use of the comic book look and feel to illustrate various music theory concepts. He is obviously a gifted teacher as well, so the clarity of his materials make these posters perfect resources for your students.
One of the coolest parts of this site is that Toby has bundled all of his assets from each category into Poster Sets - a quick way to download everything from a particular category, as well as the entire collection in one HUGE PDF.
Like any comic book writer, Toby does have a character named Sparky - who happens to be a dog - that is the unofficial mascot of his site. There are several posters that feature Sparky and this light-hearted design feature makes the subject of music theory a little more approachable in my humble opinion.
All of Toby’s resources are available for free under a Creative Commons BY-NC license. In short, you are welcome to copy them, print them, share them, change them, and use them; however, you may not take credit for them or sell them. Not a big ask.
Like many music teachers I have met, Toby seems to enjoy sharing his resources with others so that his work can help countless other students and teachers. That said, I think when folks do this they should get some type of acknowledgement or even some financial consideration for making your job easier to do. Toby does accept donations for his efforts, and I think that if you do download and use his materials that you should send him something along the lines of what you might pay for similar materials on Teachers Pay Teachers - just sayin’.
If you happen to read this - THANK YOU for what you do, Toby! These posters are amazing and a really wonderful resource to all music educators and their students!