Music Theory

Two chords should not be enough. Music theory will tell you about tension and resolution, about the need for harmonic movement, about how listeners crave the journey from one tonal…

Intervals are the atoms of melody. Every tune you’ve ever loved is built from them — the gap between one note and the next, stacked and sequenced into something that…

There is a moment in certain songs where something shifts and you feel it physically — a tightening in the throat, a prickling behind the eyes, a sense of falling…

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of a West African drumming ensemble, when the patterns stop sounding like separate things and collapse into a single, breathing organism. No…

Before there was a note, there was a pulse. Before anyone sang a melody to the night, someone hit something. A log, a bone, a chest. The sound didn’t need…

Every piece of music ever made is doing exactly two things: creating tension, and releasing it. That’s the complete list. Harmony, rhythm, dynamics, texture, register — these are all just…

Every culture on earth, working independently, arrived at the same five notes. Chinese court music, West African kora traditions, Scottish folk songs, indigenous music from the Americas — the pentatonic…

Six hundred years ago, music theorists warned singers away from a specific interval. They called it diabolus in musica — the devil in music. Not metaphorically. They meant it as…

There’s a moment when a chord progression feels like it should resolve but doesn’t — it just hangs there, neither dark nor bright, neither finished nor broken. That feeling has…

There is a moment in Barber’s Adagio for Strings where the music seems to physically press down on the chest. It is not an aggressive sound — it is quiet,…