Welcome!

Music is a language, just like any other, and it has a grammar, just like any other. I first fell into theory by accident, when I saw an explanation of what a tritone was in one of the early Suzuki books, suggesting a fingering that at the time was totally novel (playing an F-sharp with a third finger and a C on the neighboring string with a second). Actually, it's possible that I fell into it sooner—even before I could read one clef, let alone the handful more I’m proficient in nowadays—when I realized I could play something meant for the A and E strings on the D and A, or the G and D, with the exact same fingerings on any pair of adjacent strings, and so I discovered transposition when I was still very young.

Now, I’m nearly 20 years deep into my musical journey, and the grammar of the language we speak is inextricable from how I play, write, and listen. There’s an old joke that a music theorist says to their colleagues, “Come on, it isn’t rocket science, how hard can it be?” and in the next room, a team lead at NASA says, “Come on, it isn’t music theory, how hard can it be?” I’ve been listening, playing, and writing so much for so long that I’m as fluent in the language of music as I am in the spoken and written forms of English and Portuguese.

My goal is twofold: first, to create a lot of active listeners who engage with music and understand it more deeply than those who simply hear it passively; and second, to demystify music theory and prove that a few simple rules can give us the guiding principles on which humanity’s greatest musical achievements have all been built.

Throughout this series of daily articles started on January 1, 2026, we will, together, unpack and explore the vast riches of the Western musical tradition starting on January 2 with an exploration of what music is, and we'll build up from there, looking at progressively more complex concepts.

Once we've established a firm enough foundation of the basics, the focus will shift onto how to be a good listener, so, things I want to point out in certain pieces for the next time you listen to them and an explanation of why those things are important drawn from our foundation, and/or historical context about the pieces, their composers, the orchestras they were written for, and so on. 

Welcome!

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35: Figured Bass

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