Music theory explained through metaphor first, mechanics second. Ten concepts — modes, modulation, counterpoint, sonata form — in a 15-page illustrated PDF.
Music theory is usually taught as a rulebook — forbidden parallel fifths, leading tones that must behave, chords under obligation. But rules imply an authority handing down decrees, and no such authority exists. What actually governs music is closer to grammar: a set of relationships so consistent that any listener absorbs them long before anyone names a single term. A child doesn't learn that a dominant seventh wants to resolve. The child feels the itch and hears the scratch.
The Grammar of Music is built on that premise. Each of the ten entries opens with a metaphor — vivid, slightly theatrical, describing what the concept feels like in motion — then walks backward into the machinery that produces the feeling. Modes become guests at a dinner party, each thrown from the same seven ingredients and each arriving with an entirely different temperament. Then the mechanics: exactly which scale degrees are altered, and why Locrian is the one mode that can never sit down.
It reads in both directions. Use it as a study companion when you need the mechanics clean and correct, or as a field guide to the sensations that theory was invented to explain in the first place.
Fifteen pages, illustrated with clean diagrams, typeset for reading rather than cramming. From Tabula Rasa Music Atelier.
What's inside
Musical Modes — seven rotations, seven temperaments
Modulation
Enharmonic Modulation & the Neapolitan Chord
The Harmonic Series
Counterpoint
The Bass Line
Sonata Form
Rondo Form
Refrains, Transitions & Retransitions
Concerto vs Symphony
Music theory explained through metaphor first, mechanics second. Ten concepts — modes, modulation, counterpoint, sonata form — in a 15-page illustrated PDF.
Music theory is usually taught as a rulebook — forbidden parallel fifths, leading tones that must behave, chords under obligation. But rules imply an authority handing down decrees, and no such authority exists. What actually governs music is closer to grammar: a set of relationships so consistent that any listener absorbs them long before anyone names a single term. A child doesn't learn that a dominant seventh wants to resolve. The child feels the itch and hears the scratch.
The Grammar of Music is built on that premise. Each of the ten entries opens with a metaphor — vivid, slightly theatrical, describing what the concept feels like in motion — then walks backward into the machinery that produces the feeling. Modes become guests at a dinner party, each thrown from the same seven ingredients and each arriving with an entirely different temperament. Then the mechanics: exactly which scale degrees are altered, and why Locrian is the one mode that can never sit down.
It reads in both directions. Use it as a study companion when you need the mechanics clean and correct, or as a field guide to the sensations that theory was invented to explain in the first place.
Fifteen pages, illustrated with clean diagrams, typeset for reading rather than cramming. From Tabula Rasa Music Atelier.
What's inside
Musical Modes — seven rotations, seven temperaments
Modulation
Enharmonic Modulation & the Neapolitan Chord
The Harmonic Series
Counterpoint
The Bass Line
Sonata Form
Rondo Form
Refrains, Transitions & Retransitions
Concerto vs Symphony
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