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You teach students to play. Gradus teaches them to compose.
At conservatory rigor, for the price of a method book per year per student. A studio with three students writing weekly is a studio whose graduates can read a Brahms score and a studio whose graduates can write one. The teacher dashboard tracks every student’s submissions and critique threads in one place; Maestro’s structured feedback between lessons means you are not the only voice in the room. Built on the Theory of Tonal Movement and the historical method from Fux through Boulanger — the same lineage your conservatory training was already pointed at.
That is your work — and it matters. What Gradus gives your students is something instrument lessons almost never do: the ability to compose. To take what they hear, what they play, what they feel — and put it down on paper in a form that can be read, performed, and critiqued.
Knowing how to play and knowing how to write are two different skills. Most students never get the second one. Gradus is how they get it.
The method is built on twelve stages of compositional study — starting with a single melodic line and ending with an original capstone composition. Every stage produces compositions. Every composition gets critique. The student learns by doing, not by watching.
The Gradus curriculum is built on Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum — the counterpoint treatise that trained Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and that Boulanger still taught to a generation of the 20th century’s greatest composers. The name Gradus is a direct reference to that tradition.
History is the curriculum. Students learn theory the way it was actually discovered — era by era, problem by problem. The rules make sense because students live through the moments when they were established.
The students who compose understand music differently than the students who only play. Gradus is how you give them both.