The grammar of music — notation, scales, harmony and counterpoint — which described what composers did before it prescribed.
13 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Story of Notation
C. F. Abdy Williams · 1903
Traces staff notation back through neumes and mensural signs, arguing that notation's odd conventions are fossils of performance problems each era…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Six Lectures on Harmony
George Alexander Macfarren · 1867
Delivered at the Royal Institution, argues that modulation is governed by the listener's sense of key relationship rather than by mechanical chord…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Gradus ad Parnassum
Johann Joseph Fux · 1725
Sets out species counterpoint as a graded pedagogy, arguing that mastering strict two-voice writing note-against-note is the necessary foundation for…
+5 more at this level
12 of 13 works
C. F. Abdy Williams
Traces staff notation back through neumes and mensural signs, arguing that notation's odd conventions are fossils of performance problems each era was trying to solve.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026George Alexander Macfarren
Delivered at the Royal Institution, argues that modulation is governed by the listener's sense of key relationship rather than by mechanical chord substitution rules.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Percy Goetschius
Works through scale, interval, chord and phrase construction as the shared vocabulary underlying tonal composition, before any particular style is layered on top.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ebenezer Prout
Codifies triadic harmony and figured bass into a graded system of rules and exercises that became the standard English-language harmony course for half a century.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ebenezer Prout
Teaches part-writing as a discipline of independent melodic lines kept consonant by rule, arguing that free counterpoint is strict counterpoint with its constraints relaxed one at a time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Hugo Riemann
Replaces figured-bass chord cataloguing with a functional theory in which every chord acts as tonic, subdominant or dominant, explaining progressions by role rather than position.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ebenezer Prout
Analyses phrase, period, and the standard forms from binary to sonata as a shared architecture that later composers vary rather than abandon.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Johann Joseph Fux
Sets out species counterpoint as a graded pedagogy, arguing that mastering strict two-voice writing note-against-note is the necessary foundation for free composition.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alexander J. Ellis
Introduces the cents system for measuring pitch and uses it to show that the scales of different musical cultures are not approximations of one natural scale but genuinely different systems.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Binning Monro
Reconstructs the Greek modal system from primary sources and argues that medieval and later theorists systematically misapplied the Greek mode names to different scales.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Percy Goetschius
Argues that homophonic forms from song to rondo are all elaborations of a single phrase-group logic, and teaches analysis by tracing that logic through real scores.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William A. Sethares
Argues that consonance is not a fixed property of an interval but a relationship between a timbre's spectrum and the scale it is played in, so changing one lets a composer redesign the other.