Best music theory apps and books for classical pianists
Name the chord in the morning. Find it in a nocturne the same day.
Every app here drills something you can check at the keyboard tonight, and every one of them stops at the drill. An interval or a roman numeral sticks once you find it in a piece you are learning.
Drill apps
musictheory.net and Tenuto
The site is free, with lessons from the staff up to chord progressions and Neapolitan chords, and exercises that ask you to name or build notes, intervals, scales and chords on a staff or a keyboard, plus ear training. Tenuto is the same 24 exercises as a $4.99 iPhone and iPad app with a timed challenge mode. Every exercise is one chord or interval on its own.
Teoria
Free and run on donations for 29 years, with tutorials on intervals, scales, chords, harmonic functions and musical form, and exercises that go further than most, including harmonic progressions, harmonic analysis and four-voice dictation. It teaches you to hear a progression. Take the same chords into a nocturne.
Hooktheory
Hookpad is a chord-and-melody sketchpad with a free tier, then $7.99 a month or $199 for life, and TheoryTab is its database of more than 80,000 songs analyzed in roman numerals. The $14.99 Hooktheory I book teaches harmony from those songs in a relative notation that needs no staff reading. The examples are Taylor Swift, The Beatles, Lady Gaga, and Bruno Mars.
Perfect Ear
Free on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Android, with $4.99 for the full exercise pack or $14.99 for Premium. It drills intervals, chords with inversions and progressions, scales, rhythm, melodic dictation and sight reading, and the exercises are its own.
Functional Ear Trainer
Free desktop software since 2002 and a free phone app with a $19.99 Plus upgrade. It plays a cadence to set the key, then one note, and you name its scale degree, which is Alain Benbassat’s method and the skill that lets you hear a melody as degrees of a key. It trains single notes and pairs of notes, not chords.
ToneGym
A free plan, then Pro at $13.95 a month or $204 for life, with 17 games covering intervals, chords, progressions, scales, rhythm, melodic dictation and sight-reading in a daily workout of 10 to 15 minutes. You track progress as a game score.
Books
Open Music Theory
Free online and as a PDF under CC BY-SA, version 2 from 2023 by Mark Gotham and six co-authors. It covers fundamentals, diatonic and chromatic harmony, form, jazz and pop, with a complete workbook of assignments. This is the reference to keep open when a chord in a score has a name you do not know. It follows a college sequence, fundamentals first.
Tonal Harmony
Kostka and Payne’s standard text, now Kostka and Almén in the 9th edition of 2024: $261.99 in print or $65.99 as a 180-day eBook from McGraw Hill, 28 chapters from fundamentals to post-tonal music, a two-year college sequence priced for a syllabus. Buy the eBook or a used copy.
The Complete Musician
Laitz and Callahan, fifth edition, Oxford, $147.99 at the Juilliard Store. Its stance is music in context, how theory informs performance, which makes it the college text closest to what a pianist needs.
Harmony at the Piano
Ken Johansen, Routledge, 2024, paperback around $70 to $85 depending on the seller. Written for pianists: chord progressions, figured bass, melody harmonization, reduction and repertoire study, all as drills at the keyboard. It is the one book here that expects you to play the harmony rather than write it, and it assumes you already play advanced repertoire.
In the pieces you play
In Chopin every bar is a chord you can name and play. In a Chopin Left Hand edition every chord is named above the staff (B, F♯⁷, C♯m, E♯°⁷) and numbered below (I, V⁷, vii°⁷/V, Ger⁺⁶), the right hand is exactly as Chopin wrote it, and the left hand is one plain root-position chord per harmony, so you can play the whole progression through as slowly as you need to hear it. Boxed section letters mark the form, and the analysis page explains the notable chords: what the German sixth is doing in bar 23 of the E minor prelude, why the cadenza of Op. 9 No. 2 sits on one chord, B♭⁷, before E♭ arrives.
Do the diminished-seventh drill in the morning, then find D°⁷ in bar 1 of Op. 9 No. 2 with your hands on it. Once the progression has names, you can restart from any bar.
The path: musictheory.net names the chords and intervals for free (Tenuto does the same on iPhone and iPad for $4.99), Open Music Theory explains them for free, and one Chopin Left Hand edition puts them in a nocturne for $9, so the whole path costs under $15.
Add Functional Ear Trainer, free, to train scale degrees.
The E minor prelude, then Op. 9 No. 2
The E minor prelude, Op. 28 No. 4, is the classic first harmonic analysis: 25 bars, Largo, a left hand that sinks by half steps under a melody that barely moves, and a deceptive cadence and a German sixth in the last five bars, all named on a 2-page PDF. Then Op. 9 No. 2, 34 bars in which the theme returns over nearly the same chords each time, so you learn one progression and hear it four ways.