Thanks so much for this website...now music finally makes sense to me :) I'm tellin' all my musical friends about it too!

Thanks for your positive feedback. It brings us great joy to know that our work has been meaningful to you.

Just a few words to say how deeply I have been moved by Music Novatory. Since I discovered it a week ago I have been spending my free time reading it (and my business time ruminating about it while doing something else...). It has been the second blow to my musical vision of the world in my life - the first one being the reading of Salzer's Structural Hearing, which made me discover Schenkerian analysis - and under many respects the strongest : after all, I had heard something of Schenker before, even if the matter was carefully avoided during several years I spent studying composition in an Italian conservatory (the reference book for advanced harmony being Schoenberg's Harmonielehre), while MusicNovatory was a fresh discovery to me... I cannot understand why such a comprehensive, extremely well-knitted, coherent understanding could not get a much wider diffusion.
I am in the very initial phase, where I only want to read and understand as an absolute beginner, so no questions to ask yet. I would like to just assess how much I already owe to you for the work you made... Thanks again, best wishes,

Letters like yours are very heart-warming and most appreciated, especially coming all the way from an Italian Conservatory graduate. We would love to be able to answer you in Italian, but we will simply say "grazie mille ! ".

Since you obviously would appreciate some comments on your page I can give you some... You provide a lot of very insightful information on your page, and it is a pleasure to browse, except for... I think presentation is the weakest point of your site. You obviously made a lot of effort to make it all clear but to a newcomer (me) it is really a maze of colors and paragraphs one on top of the other, very hard to make sense, and an effort to read... Due to complexity of the contents I would advise... [lots of helpful suggestions deleted]

Thank you very much for your constructive comments about our web site. We very much appreciate the time and effort you spent in order to give us feedback. The colors used on the site have very specific signification and are meant to be helpful. We hope that referring to the color page will be useful. We will be studying your other suggestions and attempting to implement as many as possible in the near future, although it may take some time to sort everything out.

How do you pronounce "Novatory"?

"Nova-" as in Chevy Nova, Nova Scotia, super nova,
"-tory" as in laboratory, conservatory.

Why don't you ever mention the name of the person who posts the question or comment?

We made this decision after serious deliberation for several reasons. We wanted to avoid all possible personal clashes by remaining anonymous and concentrating on the subject matter (what music is all about). As far as this page is concerned, you do not know who we are and we do not know who you are. Rather than being placed in opposite corners, we are placed side by side, both facing the subject which we are discussing. This removes a lot of tension when we disagree on something. Probably even more important is the fact that, as teachers, we are well aware how difficult it is to get someone to ask questions. Many people fear that their question might not be a "good" question and refrain from asking it. We hope that under the cloak of anonymity, you will feel free to ask ANY question you want. Not only will we be happy to answer it, but also send you a word of thanks and appreciation.

And another question - what do you mean by "Level-1-Chapter" and of course the other levels ?

This document is organised into 5 Volumes, each of which is subdivided into several Levels of Chapters, where (Level-1) chapters are subdivided into more (Level-2) chapters and so on, and where Level 1 is the largest, just below that of the Volumes and Levels 2, 3, 4 ... are evidently smaller and smaller, each a subdivision of the next larger level. This Chapter hierarchy is used to organize and structure the document contents.