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.
Continue reading “I wrote a song about chromatic embellishments”
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.
Continue reading “End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool”
In a previous post, I listed examples of melodic suspensions. But I didn’t do a very good job of explaining how they work. So I will rectify that here.
This week in aural skills, we are covering embellishing tones. This topic is tough, because I can never remember the difference between an appoggiatura and an escape tone without looking it up, but it’s on the syllabus, so I have to try. In previous semesters, I have approached it by having students identify examples from songs. That can be productive, especially when we talk about ambiguities and edge cases, but it’s too easy for people to zone out. I wanted something more active and creative.
My general principle with music theory and aural skills is that the only way to internalize the concepts is to use them for your own music making; otherwise, you won’t retain them past the end of the semester (or the end of the day). To understand melodic embellishments, the students should ideally be improvising their own melodic embellishments. So my plan is to provide them with some nice simple unembellished melodies, give them clear examples of the different embellishing techniques we’re expecting them to learn, and then see what they come up with in the moment.
Sometimes people ask me if they can take one of my classes without being enrolled at NYU or the New School. For these people, I have good news: this summer, I will be teaching Songwriter’s Lab, an eight week online songwriting course that I’m collaborating on with the good people at Synthase. I met their founder Nate May a few years ago and we have been mutual admirers ever since, so it’s exciting to be working on this with him and his team.
Here’s a video in which I briefly discuss the class with Huijuan Ling from Synthase.
Continue reading “New online songwriting class with Synthase”
MusicRadar has so far mostly only asked me to write about music that I like, but once in a while I have to put my own preferences aside. I did it for Wonderwall, and this week I did it again for ABBA.
For MusicRadar, I wrote an analysis of “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” to honor the passing of Roy Ayers. I have loved this tune for a long time, but I could never muster the energy to work out those chords until now.
Here’s a simple-seeming song that is a subject of a lot of music-theoretic controversy. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac only has two chords (plus a third chord that only appears once), so it seems like it would be easy to analyze its harmony. And yet, no one can agree what key it’s in.
The two chords are F and G, repeating endlessly for one bar each. During the choruses, you could call them Fmaj7 and G6. There’s also that lone Am chord in the instrumental break after the first chorus. The vocal melody is all on the A minor pentatonic scale. That would seem to settle it: the song is in A minor. So why all the controversy?
Continue reading “What key is “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac actually in?”
I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the one concession to his Midwestern roots. His own parents had probably gone out dancing to the Texas Playboys in South Dakota when they were young, so I assume my dad had the Tiffany Transcriptions CD out of nostalgia. My sister and I found it when we were going through his stuff after he died. We liked it a lot better than the opera CDs, so we ended up listening to it on endless repeat while we emptied drawers and closets.
In my MusicRadar column honoring Roberta Flack, I thought of a new analogy for secondary dominant chords, and I figured that I should work it into a new explainer with some new graphics. So, if you are having trouble understanding how these chords work, read on.
Secondary dominant chords solve a specific problem: how to make functional tonal harmony more interesting while still keeping things functional. The first concept you need to understand is that every major and minor key has a chord built on its fifth scale degree, the V7 chord. In Western tonal theory, these are the dominant chords, so named because they dominate the key: they create tension and suspense, which is released when you resolve to the tonic chord. The circle of fifths is a useful visualization scheme for the keys and their dominant chords.
Now let’s consider the key of C major. It comprises the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. You can combine these notes to form seven chords: C, Dm, E, F, G, Am, and B°. These chords sound good together in pretty much any order and any combination, but they are bland and lacking in drama. How can you introduce some more color into your C major harmony without throwing random notes and chords around?
