Music Theory

Time Travel in Music: Rounds and Fugues

Our last two blog posts looked at how two or more distinct melodies can be juxtaposed in counterpoint. But it

We saw in the last blog post how the melody “Puff the Magic Dragon” fits neatly in counterpoint with the

One of the most important devices in a good composer’s toolbox is counterpoint, the art of combining two or more

Most tonal pieces start in the “home key” — the “tonic,” as musicians call it — and return to it

Most musicians are familiar with the seven-tone diatonic set, which determines the pitches for a major scale or a natural

I related the “Seven Plus or Minus Two” principle to pitches and harmonic centers in an earlier post to this

Non-musicians sometimes confuse dissonance with atonality. As a tonal Romantic composer, I like to highlight the difference using an analogy

In this blog’s first post, we looked at the physics behind our harmonic/melodic system. But music isn’t just a physical

Is music just a cultural product, or does it also have roots in nature? I contend that the tonal system