Here’s a subject I have written about a few times before, and it provoked a lot of debate in the comments and elsewhere. Let’s see how folks react to the audio version.
Are blue notes out of tune? by Ethan Hein
Or are they more in tune than the piano-key pitches are?
It’s modulation week in aural skills class, and that means we get to talk about my two favorite pop song key changes, both of which are from the same Michael Jackson song.
The song was written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett. Michael and Quincy Jones produced. Glen Ballard also co-wrote and produced “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips and “Hand in my Pocket” by Alanis Morrissette. The man has a way with an indelible earworm.
Making my first podcast episode really lit a fire under me, so I quickly produced a second one, about quartal harmony in jazz, classical and film music.
The Fourths Chord by Ethan Hein
The sound that connects McCoy Tyner, Erik Satie, Miles Davis and Star Trek
Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious Monk, recorded in 1957.
I love Monk so much that I forget how divisive he can be. A couple of my students visibly flinched at the opening seconds of this recording. In fairness to them, it is definitely intense.
We’re coming up on blues melody day in aural skills class. I always like to do some close listening to Aretha Franklin for that session, especially her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I hadn’t previously done any analysis of it; we just listen and let it speak for itself. But I thought, this semester, I want to be more ambitious and get into the details.
There are two kinds of embellishing tones, the ones from inside the key and the ones from outside. The outside ones are called chromatic embellishments, and that name is appropriate; you get the most color from careful application of the “wrong” notes.
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness is a good predictor of whether I will like a song or not.