Improvisation is the easiest and the hardest thing in music. Little kids do it effortlessly, while world-class performers and composers find it terrifying. I am a confident improvisor, but it took me a few decades to get here. Now I’m teaching classrooms full of undergrads to do it, which means coming up with more of a method than the aimless stumbling that I did. That method involves a lot of careful curation and editing of recordings. We will be listening to some of these as we go.
Most of the music I write about ranges from well known to iconic. I am not one of these people who takes pleasure in knowing about obscurities that other people don’t. However, I do have one intense fandom for a couple of guys who you are likely not to have heard of: Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine. I took the family to see them recently in a converted church in Kingston, NY, and the music sounded like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My son the Ursula Le Guin fan thinks they sound like a pair of bards from one of the more remote islands in Earthsea. I leave their shows with my senses fully activated in a way that rarely happens at my age.
When I was talking to Peter after the Kingston show, he mentioned that he and Tim have been playing music together for forty years. You can tell! In addition to their renewed touring activity, they have also released a new album, exquisitely recorded (“live and unprocessed”) by Barry Diament.
Continue reading “More people should be listening to Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine”
I don’t know whether this is my best podcast episode, but it is definitely my most podcast episode. It covers the Beatles, James Brown, Parliament, Michael Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Underworld, The Orb, Run-DMC, Ella Fitzgerald, Simon and Garfunkel, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, Sabrina Carpenter, the Temptations, Herbie Hancock, Count Basie, Eddie Harris, Miles Davis, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Frédéric Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach, and John Cage.
We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life’s release, and I plan to put in some quality musicology on it. I’m starting now, with a look at a single chord in “Sir Duke”, the one that first appears at 0:48 in the chorus:
My favorite NPR show included my remix of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 in their most recent episode about hookworms! It’s under the end credits. This is something I posted to Bandcamp six years ago and forgot about, but you never know what people are going to go looking for online.
Anyway, exciting day for me.
I have mentioned the Beatles on the podcast before, but this is the first episode entirely about one of their songs. It will probably be the first of many.
My NYU colleague Derek and I are delighted to introduce you to Tuniversity, our new music learning venture. Our first songwriting course starts next month.
It’s blues melody week in theory and aural skills. That doesn’t just mean we’re looking at the blues genre, though; we’re covering all the genres that use what Richard Ripani calls “the blues system”: the characteristic pitches, harmonies, rhythms and vocal techniques that make music sound bluesy. Gospel uses the blues system extensively, and nobody sings bluesy gospel better than Aretha Franklin.
In class, we’re examining Aretha’s recording of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”, a 19th century hymn that is sung around the world in many different languages. It originated as a poem that Joseph Scriven wrote in 1855 to comfort his mother. The alliteratively-named Charles Crozat Converse set the poem to music in 1868. Fun fact about Converse: he advocated for “thon” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Continue reading “The Gospel According To Aretha”
My most recent column for MusicRadar is an explainer on Quebec’s hottest microtonal prog-techno sensation.
If you major in music at most universities, you have to take several semesters of aural skills classes. These classes traditionally consist of two main activities: sight-singing and dictation, that is, hearing a melody or chord sequence a few times and then writing it out in notation. Aural skills class was the definite low point of my grad school education, and it helped deter me from studying music as an undergrad. I find sight-singing and dictation to be intensely stressful, because I’m terrible at them and because I have never had to do them in real musical life.
NYU’s new pop music theory sequence has its own aural skills classes, and I am pleasantly surprised to find myself teaching them. I can do it because these classes are very different from the ones that I took. Some of that is the repertoire: Stevie Wonder rather than Beethoven. The structure of the class is different too. The music we’re studying exists as recordings, not notated scores. It was substantially created by ear, and is substantially learned that way. So while we do work on notation-related skills, it can’t be the only thing on the menu. (Most of my students are better readers than I am anyway!) My job is to create classroom activities and assignments that are appropriate to pop music and its learning methods.
Continue reading “Check out these grooves that I have my aural skills students improvise over”
