I wrote a lot of posts about the Grateful Dead last year. I started doing it for my own enjoyment and interest, and was pleasantly surprised by how many enthusiastic responses I got. I have also been surprised by how interested my students have been in hearing about these songs. I started thinking that I had enough to say for a book, and that there might be an audience for such a thing.
Continue reading “I want to write a book about the Grateful Dead”
To tie in with the new Dylan movie, MusicRadar asked me to analyze “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” My first choice would have been “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, my favorite Dylan song and one of my favorite songs by anyone ever, but I was happy to go with their request too, it’s a beauty.
Continue reading “MusicRadar column on one of Bob Dylan’s greatest hits”
It has been a big year for my writing life. My work life continues to consist of badly paid contingent faculty work, but hope springs eternal. So here’s a list of things I wrote and what I am hoping happens as a result.
This year, in addition to teaching my first NYU pop music theory class, I also taught two semesters of pop aural skills. If you didn’t go through a university music program, you may not know what aural skills class involves. Traditionally, you identify chords and intervals by ear, practice sight-singing, and do dictation (meaning, you listen to a piece of music a few times and then notate it.) Pop music is mainly aural, so naturally, aural skills are important. But what should a pop aural skills class look like? Pop musicians definitely need to be able to identify things by ear, but reading and writing notation are less important for them than learning from recordings and improvising.
See also: my year in pop aural skills teaching
This year I taught my first theory class in NYU’s new popular music sequence. It was not my first music theory class, or my first pop music class, but it was the first one in a university-level sequence dedicated specifically to pop. I think it mostly went great, and certainly the feedback from the students has been positive, but there are some rough edges remaining to smooth out.
Like the rest of the theory adjuncts in the department, I was given a syllabus to follow, but I had broad discretion in how I addressed each topic. Here’s the topic list: Continue reading “My year in pop music theory teaching”
New on MusicRadar, I take a mostly sympathetic look at Paul McCartney’s omnipresent and divisive earworm. I don’t generally like Christmas music, but this song is so goofy and odd that I can’t help but find it endearing. The main problem with it is that the tempo is too fast and the feel is too square. I thought it would be fun to hear it with a better groove, specifically, the one from “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder.
This is the collaboration that I wish Paul and Stevie had done.
I haven’t done any culture war material lately, but Jason Yust recently published an article in the Journal of Music Theory with the title “Tonality and Racism“, and I couldn’t not respond. The arguments in the paper are relevant to my teaching life in NYU’s new and wonderful pop theory and aural skills sequence. These classes are vastly more inclusive and culturally relevant than the extremely white and Eurocentric classical theory sequence that I went through as an NYU grad student. However, we still have some work to do.
In casual language, my NYU students use “music theory” to mean “Western European tonal theory and its accompanying notation and symbolic language.” So when they say “[Pop musician] doesn’t know music theory”, they mean, “[Pop musician] doesn’t read notation” or “[Pop musician] doesn’t know the conventions of tonal harmony.” If I push back, students will quickly self-correct and say that any abstract thinking about music counts as music theory, and that [Pop musician] certainly is thinking theoretically. But I’m concerned about this reflexive usage.
Continue reading “Jason Yust on the racist history of tonality”
Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented chords, tritone substitutions, and modal interchange at a nice slow tempo. I love when I can get this much juice out of a single tune.
First, here’s the T-Bone Walker original from 1947, with the unwieldy title “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)“.
My latest MusicRadar column advances the theory that to be a truly generation-spanning pop colossus, a song has to be at least a little bit weird and annoying.
This was a tricky thing to write, because I wasn’t looking for “popular songs that I personally find annoying.” That would be easy, I find most popular songs to be annoying. But there’s a difference between a song being annoying because it’s boring, lazy and predictable, and a song being annoying because it’s weird and counterintuitive. That’s the good kind of annoying!
The most common entry point for Grateful Dead listeners is the acoustic folkie material, especially “Uncle John’s Band”. That makes sense; the song is fun, memorable, and relatively accessible. It seems like it would make a good campfire singalong. But then you get in there to try to learn it, and the song turns out to be extremely odd. Like a lot of Dead tunes!
This excellent episode of the 500 Songs podcast tells how label executive Joe Smith was ecstatic when he heard UJB for the first time. He supposedly ran into the hallway and grabbed people, shouting “We’ve got a single! We’ve got a single!” UJB was the first Dead song that made it onto the Hot One Hundred, getting up to number sixty-nine. It sounds very little like “Touch of Grey“, the only Dead song to hit the top ten, but both songs share a kind of wry “what are you gonna do” attitude.
