Pedagogy
How to Choose a Homeschool Music Curriculum
Homeschool music programs teach very different things. The four main kinds of music curriculum, what each gives your child, and how to choose the right one.
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Reflections on composition, teaching, and the craft of music
Homeschool music programs teach very different things. The four main kinds of music curriculum, what each gives your child, and how to choose the right one.
You don't need to read music to teach your child to compose. How children learn to write music at home, what the parent does, and where to begin.
Receive new reflections on composition and the craft of music.
Every week more AI agents are being asked to write music. They oblige — and produce the part of the work that matters least, often badly. We built a free open notation tool so the rendering and the theory at least come out right. We trust the craft to remain with the human composer; we do not trust the rendering pipeline to remain accurate without intervention.
The composers who score blockbuster films, the jazz pianists who reharmonize standards, the singer-songwriters who make you cry at the bridge — they all drew from the same well. The craft has one foundation.
AI can produce output that resembles music. It cannot develop musical judgment, a trained ear, or a compositional voice — because those are earned through practice, not computed.
Aesthetic judgment is not subjective opinion. Balance, contrast, tension and release, unity and variety are constant principles. What changed across eras was not these principles but taste — specifically, what counted as acceptable dissonance.
Conservatories, video masterclasses, and private instruction each have a legitimate place in a composer's education — and each has real limits. Between them sits a gap: a rigorous practice system, available anywhere, that demands you write every day.
A student can define an authentic cadence, explain a suspension, and describe the rules of first-species counterpoint — and still write nothing usable. This is not a talent gap. It is a practice gap, and it has a name.
The internet is full of shortcut frameworks and ten-tip lists for writing better music. Mastery is built differently — through sustained practice of the same disciplines that trained Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms.
Counterpoint is the art of writing two or more independent melodic lines that work together. Every major composer from Haydn to Hindemith studied Fux's method of species counterpoint, and the reason is simple: it is the most direct way to train the ear.
Most students cannot afford a private composition teacher. The critique Maestro provides is what the student should be getting between lessons — specific, analytical, and grounded in the actual score they wrote.
Every great composer studied the scores of great composers obsessively. Score study is not passive listening — it is active analysis of decisions, bar by bar, and it is the oldest training method in the tradition.
Most music education teaches students to identify chords and label forms, then calls this composition. It is not. Knowing the name of a thing and being able to do it are two entirely different skills.