The first thing you need to know about why I love teaching music theory is a little secret: I actually failed beginning music theory the first time I took it.
I didn't understand any of it. It just looked like a sea of identical dots. Some meant sing higher, some lower, some longer, some shorter—plus a whole parallel universe of symbols for silence. It felt like being handed a grade 3 chapter book when I was still an infant.
We don't expect infants to read sentences before they can babble their first words. In language acquisition, we start with raw sounds, then letters, then single words like mama or dada.
Music is no different. It is a fully functional, living language complete with syntax, punctuation, and semiotics (the study of symbols). When I write the letter b on a chalkboard, that isn't a literal object—it’s a symbol. By itself, it's pretty lonely. It needs a community of other letters to make magic happen.
Have you ever wondered why there are exactly 12 notes in an octave? It isn't a random coincidence. The number 12 is the smallest number in existence that has so many options for division. It can be divided perfectly by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. That mathematical symmetry is why music gives us an almost infinite playground of choices.
Because you already successfully mastered the English language, I already know with absolute certainty that you can master the language of music. You've already proven you have the exact cognitive hardware required!
So, we are going to leave the overwhelming mountain of sharps, flats, multiple clefs, and complex key signatures off to the side for now. We will start with just one clef and only the specific symbols we need today.
Let's stop staring at a cage of rules, and start learning how to speak.
Enjoying Music Theory (Second Edition) is currently on the design bench! I am meticulously reformatting each chapter directly inside Adobe InDesign to ensure the print layout is absolutely exquisite.
An Inclusive Music Experience: Beyond standard print, I am hand-crafting custom accessibility text, building structured object export tags, and designing a fully accessible, tagged PDF layout. This means whether you hold the physical book in your hands or read it as an inclusive e-book on a screen, the language of music will be flawlessly clear and open to everyone.