Resource: Toby Rush Music Theory posters
Every once in a while you stumble across a website created my a music educator that is truly wonderful. Let me introduce you to Music Theory for Musicians and Normal People by Toby Rush. I found this site about 5-6 years ago and I always recommend it to music teachers looking for music theory resources.
The webpage is one of several created by Toby Rush - an Assistant Professor of Music Theory & Technology at the University of Dayton, in Dayton, Ohio. He has created several excellent resources, including Braille resources for music educators. Be sure to check those other pages out.
It is Toby’s music theory resources and posters that truly knocked me out when I first saw them. He has a very keen eye for design and it shows in the posters that he has created. I LOVE the comic book-like feel of the text and your students will too. He also has a wonderful sense of humor and I’ve laughed at quite a few of the little blurbs throughout the posters. The posters (there are 62 of them) are filled with lots of information and cover a wide variety of topics, including: music fundamentals (pitch, rhythm, harmony), scales, key & time signatures, intervals, the circle of fifths - you name it - it’s all there.
If I was still teaching middle school music, I would DEFINITELY have put these posters up around my classroom. To put it simply - they look REALLY cool and are a departure from the usual boring music theory posters that are available. You can purchase any of them individually, or you can buy sets of posters, or even the whole collection. They are very reasonably priced. If you can’t afford to purchase them, Toby makes them available to download, but I urge you to consider supporting his work. Toby licenses all of his posters with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, which means that you can download and print them freely, but you can’t try to take credit for their creation, sell them or alter them in any way. A pretty sweet deal.
Toby - if you happen to read this - THANK YOU for making these incredible resources available to music educators around the world!