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Listening Guides
How to follow form, texture, tempo and mood in a piece, movement by movement.
Listening Guides
How to follow a symphony without a score
A practical method for tracking movements, returns and big structural moments by ear.
Listening Guides
Listening to a fugue: hearing one idea multiply
How to catch an entry of the subject and follow it as the texture thickens.
Listening Guides
Dynamics, tempo and character: what the markings ask for
The instructions composers left on the page, and how they shape what you hear.
Listening Guides
Hearing texture: melody, accompaniment and everything between
Monophony, homophony and polyphony, and why texture changes the feel of a passage.
How to use this portal. Pick a composer or a single work, listen once without reading, then come back to the guide and listen again. Music rewards the second hearing far more than the first, and the vocabulary you pick up here is meant to make that second hearing sharper.