Guided listening first
Start from the sound itself, not from a glossary.
Season One Ready
Classical music for people who want to hear it whole.
Ear for the Masters is a guided audio education in Western classical music. It starts with Theory Foundations: an 18-episode first season on pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm, form, orchestration, post-tonality, rhetoric, and deep structure, built to train the ear instead of stopping at vocabulary.
Teach the ear before the jargon.
Hear what cadence, sequence, and texture actually do, and the repertoire opens up quickly.
Works as a season
Eighteen episodes that stand alone as a complete first course.
Built for serious curiosity
Accessible in tone, ambitious in scope, and built for long-term listening.
Theory Foundations
Eighteen episodes moving from pitch and melody through harmony, form, orchestration, rhythm, tuning, rhetoric, and deep structure. Every episode below can be streamed or downloaded directly.
Episode 1
Pitch, Scales, and Keys: Beyond the Basics
Modes, key as gravity, and how composers exploit your expectations.
Episode 2
Melody and Phrasing: Hearing the Sentence
Antecedent-consequent, period structure, and endless melody.
Episode 3
Harmony: From Pop Progressions to Classical Logic
Inversions, seventh chords, functional harmony, and pedal points.
Episode 4
Rhythm and Meter: The Advanced Ear
Hemiola, cross-rhythm, additive rhythm, and augmentation.
Episode 5
Motifs: The DNA of Music
How four notes can generate the identity and structure of a symphony.
Episode 6
Counterpoint: Music in Conversation
Canon, fugue, and the art of hearing independent voices in relation.
Episode 7
Texture, Timbre, and Orchestration
Why the same notes can sound utterly different when color, register, and layering change.
Episode 8
Harmony II: Chromaticism, Modulation, and the End of Tonality
From Mozart's tonal clarity to Schoenberg's world beyond the center.
Episode 9
Form: The Architecture of Music
How music remembers itself through return, contrast, and development.
Episode 10
Advanced Harmony: The Chords That Make Romantic Music Ache
Secondary dominants, modal mixture, the Neapolitan, and the augmented sixth.
Episode 11
Voice Leading: Why Chord Progressions Feel Inevitable
How lines create necessity inside harmony.
Episode 12
Orchestration: The Art of Choosing Who Plays What
Register, doubling, spacing, balance, and contrast in orchestral thought.
Episode 13
Post-Tonal Theory: Making Sense of Music Without Keys
How interval, cell, symmetry, process, and ordered pitch can replace tonal gravity.
Episode 14
Advanced Rhythm: Hemiola, Metric Modulation, and Additive Process
How composers reorganize time through regrouping, pulse pivots, cells, and process.
Episode 15
Tuning and Temperament: Why Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Changed Everything
How tuning systems changed what harmony could imagine.
Episode 16
The Overtone Series: The Physics Underneath All of Music
How harmonic partials shape timbre, resonance, consonance, and orchestration.
Episode 17
Musical Topics and Rhetoric: The Classical Vocabulary of Gestures
How Classical music speaks in recognizable social and dramatic types.
Episode 18
Schenkerian Analysis: Hearing the Deep Structure
How tonal music sustains long-range coherence beneath surface detail.
Nine tracks, one curriculum.
Theory Foundations is only Track 0. The broader project is designed as a structured path through repertoire, history, style, forms, sacred music, opera, and listening practice.
Theory Foundations
The grammar of listening: pitch, melody, rhythm, harmony, form, orchestration, rhetoric, and deep structure.
The Canon, Heard Properly
The essential works and why they became essential, with attention to form, style, and historical placement.
Style Through Time
From chant and counterpoint to Classicism, Romanticism, and modern fracture.
The Composer Worlds
Focused encounters with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and others.
Forms and Genres
Symphony, sonata, quartet, concerto, mass, requiem, lied, opera, and tone poem as living structures.
Sacred and Dramatic Worlds
How ritual, text, stage, and theology change musical time and expressive pressure.
Listening Labs
Repeated hearing sessions organized around specific skills: cadence, sequence, orchestral color, motive, and texture.
Advanced Paths
Entry points for deeper work in analysis, aesthetics, interpretation, and twentieth-century technique.
A Lifelong Listening Course
The long goal: make the great repertoire feel inhabited rather than merely admired from outside.
Start with the first season and stream it directly from the site.
Ear for the Masters now works as a public listening surface for Theory Foundations. The broader project still includes a local app, but the first season can stand on its own here as streamable lecture audio.