After Tonality: What Composers Replaced It With
When chromatic harmony outgrew the tonal hierarchy, composers tried serial rules, rhythm, folk modes, and sound mass. What each method actually solved.
The archive
Articles
48 pieces on how music is built and how it is written down — with playable examples, tables you can check, and no filler.
Polyrhythm and Cross-Rhythm: Counting the Distinction
Polyrhythm, cross-rhythm and polymeter are not interchangeable. Counting the ratios shows what separates a divided span from a pattern set against a metre.
Reading Intervals at Sight: Generic and Specific
Naming an interval at sight takes two passes: count the staff positions first, then judge what the accidental does to the size.
The Rise of Functional Tonality: From Modes to Keys
Around 1600 the bass became the foundation of harmony and the modal system narrowed to two keys. What changed in the documents, and what the change cost.
Romantic Chromaticism and the Expanding Tonic
Chromatic harmony widened a key without leaving it: the resources that do the work, the Tristan chord, and how to analyse it without over-labelling.
Scientific Pitch Notation: What C4 Actually Means
Middle C is C4 in scientific pitch notation, C3 on some manufacturers' labelling, and MIDI note 60 in every sequencer. The numbering is a convention.
Secondary Dominants and How Tonicization Works
A secondary dominant makes any chord a temporary tonic. How to spell one, where it turns up, and what cancels the effect.
Seventh Chords and How They Resolve in Tonal Harmony
The chordal seventh falls, the leading tone rises, and the tritone at the centre of V7 resolves by step. What each diatonic seventh chord is for.
Sonata Form: The Tonal Plot
Sonata form is a tonal argument, not a set of labelled boxes. What matters is which key you are in, and how the music gets home again.
Voicing a String Quartet: Registers, Doublings, Weight
The quartet is four registers, not four violins. What each instrument can sustain, where the texture muddies, and which double stops lie under the hand.
Swing Timing: What the Notation Does Not Say
Jazz notation asks for swing and leaves the ratio to the players, because the timing is tempo-dependent and a fixed written value would be wrong at most speeds.
Voice Leading: Why the Rules Exist in Four-Part Writing
Parallel fifths, tendency tones, spacing and doubling, read as solutions to one problem: keeping four lines heard as four lines.
The ebook
Music Theory — the site as a book
The site's working library as a structured ebook: intervals, keys, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, form, tuning, orchestration and the history behind them.
- 78 pages
- PDF format
- $2.87 only
- By The musics.name project
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