Thelonious Monk plays the blues

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. 

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Aretha Franklin sings “Bridge Over Troubled Water”

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.

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I wrote a song about chromatic embellishments

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.

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End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool

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. 

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Explaining embellishing tones

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.

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New online songwriting class with Synthase

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.

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Everybody Loves The Sunshine

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. 

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What key is “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac actually in?

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?

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