Music Theory Masterclass: Music Theory for All Levels

Explore how note values define duration, including whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes, rests, dots, and ties, and learn how rhythm, meter, and tempo shape musical timing.

Learn how meter organizes rhythm with time signatures, bars and bar lines, and how binary and ternary meters create accents through note values like quarter and eighth notes.

Identify bar line types and their functions in music notation. Describe how single, double, end, and repeat bar lines divide measures and indicate repeats, with start and end repeat signs.

Explore irregular time signatures, including five and seven beat measures, learn beat grouping and accents, and study borrowed divisions or tuplets like triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, and septuplets.

Develop rhythm reading and counting skills in 4/4 music theory, using a metronome at beginner tempos to recognize quarter notes, rests, half notes, dotted quarters, and sixteenth notes.

Explore the tonality system, its Baroque roots, and how a central tonic governs chord progressions and tension and resolution, using scales as maps to determine notes.

Explore how minor scales convey sadness and emotion by contrasting major and minor tonalities, and compare natural, harmonic, and melodic minor forms with their whole-step and half-step patterns.

Explore the circle of fifths and the relationship between major and minor tonalities, including tonic, subdominant, dominant, and relative keys, to understand key signatures and modulation.

Master classifying intervals by counting half steps, distinguishing perfect, major, minor, augmented, and diminished types, and noting enharmonic and anharmonic spellings on the staff.

Learn how to invert musical intervals by moving one note an octave, revealing how major becomes minor, augmented becomes diminished, and perfect remains perfect under the nine-sum rule.

Explore consonance and dissonance, learn how major/minor seconds, sevenths, and the tritone create tension to be resolved into consonant intervals, and practice interval identification and inversions.

Explore major, minor, augmented, and diminished triads by stacking two thirds to form perfect fifths, compare major and minor qualities with examples, and learn common chord symbols.

Build four-note seventh chords by stacking a third on a triad, creating a root-to-top-note seventh interval. Explore dominant, major, minor, diminished, and half-diminished seventh chords and their score symbols.

Build triads starting on F by stacking thirds in root position and inversions, and distinguish major, minor, augmented, and diminished qualities by listening.

Explore roman numeral analysis to map scale degrees to tonic, subdominant, and dominant chords in major and minor keys, including diminished and seventh chords, and inversions.

this lecture introduces four key cadences—perfect (v–i), imperfect (i–v), plagal (iv–i), and deceptive (v–vi)—explaining how harmony creates resolution or anticipation in music.

Use scale-degree thinking and roman numeral analysis to transpose pop chord progressions quickly, applying it to I See Fire and Bones by Imagine Dragons.

Explore melodic construction by examining how melody and harmony interact. Analyze scores, motives, and intervals, and practice composing to reveal the logic, structure, and emotional messaging of melodies.

Analyze how melodies form arch and pendulum contours using ascending then descending phrases, with Jolene and Twinkle, and study micro and macro contour analysis and cadence.

Explore what makes a musical theme: a recognizable, repeating idea built from motifs and phrases that conveys the piece’s emotional core, with variations across instruments and textures.

Learn voice leading to craft melodies over a C major tonic–subdominant–dominant progression, using common tones, tendency tones, stepwise motion, and avoiding leaps and parallel motion.

Explore harmonic rhythm—the rate of chord changes—and how varying it shapes style and mood. Practice four-beat and two-beat progressions such as fly me to the moon, with roman numeral analysis.

Analyze Let It Be to apply voice leading, melody over chords, and harmonic rhythm; observe two-beat chord progressions, chord tones, and melodic motion in verse and chorus.

Explore non-chord tones to enrich melodies beyond chord tones. Learn the nine types—passing, neighbor, appoggiatura, escape, double neighbor, anticipation, pedal point, suspension, retardation—and how they’re approached and left.

Explore anticipation, a non-chord tone that becomes a chord tone in the next harmony, and pedal point, a sustained pitch over changing chords, used in cadences and melodies.

Analyze a four-part progression in c major and enrich it with non-chord tones—neighbors, passing tones, anticipations, suspensions, appoggiaturas, and double neighbors—in soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

Explore modulation by changing the key and tonal center, using closely related keys, dominant and subdominant relationships, leading tones, and practical maps to craft expressive key changes.

Explore how cadence establishes a new key and compare tonicization, passing modulation, and definitive modulation, with examples showing when a new tonality gains or loses assertive power.

Explore modulation types based on how a new key is introduced, from common-chord and harmonic modulations to sequential, chromatic, and direct modulations, establishing the new key as the musical home.

Learn how pivot chords, as common diatonic chords in both keys, enable seamless modulations between tonics and dominants, and how direct or phrase modulations jump to a new key.

Explore enharmonic modulation and its use of dominant seventh and augmented chords, contrasted with diatonic modulation, and learn chromatic modulation via neapolitan chords to distant keys.