What if harmony is too small a word? This summer I’m beginning a new series called How Tones Fit Together, exploring one of music’s oldest questions in the broadest possible sense. From the harmonic series and the quadrivium to Bach, the blues, Taylor Swift, and musical traditions from around the world, we’ll explore how human beings have organized sound—and why melody, relationship, and listening may be the real foundations of music.

Art Tatum, Beethoven, and Mozart are remembered not only for what they played or composed, but for how fluently they could think in music. They could take an idea, understand it instantly, and transform it into something new. That kind of creativity can look like magic from the outside, but it is learned through patterns, vocabulary, and practice. This is the deeper promise of partimenti: musical fluency.