Gateways to Understanding Music explores music in all the categories that constitute contemporary musical experience: European classical music, popular music, jazz, and world music. Covering the oldest forms of human music making to the newest, the textbook's chronological narrative considers music from a global rather than a Eurocentric perspective. Each of sixty modular "gateways" covers a particular genre, style, or period of music and opens with a guided listening example that unlocks a world of music through careful study of its structural elements. Students learn to listen to, explain, understand, and ultimately value all the music they may encounter in their world.

The anthology to accompany the textbook is comprised of musical "texts." These broadly-defined texts-primarily musical scores-facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno-/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular "gateway" is "Where do I go from here?" This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to examine music scores and texts in even greater depth. The anthology is a combination of primary sources for study: musical scores, music transcriptions, along with a few primary source documents and musical exercises.

This two-book package contains the paperback textbook and paperback anthology.