Musical simples

The NYU Music Experience Design Lab is putting together a new online music theory resource, and I’m writing a lot of the materials. We want to keep everything grounded in real-life musical practice. To that end, we’ve been gathering musical simples: phrases, riffs, and earworms that beginners can learn easily. My criteria for a good musical simple: It should be a piece of music that can stand on its own, and that makes a satisfying loop. It should be catchy, attractive, and (ideally) already familiar. And it should be between one and four measures long. We’re developing a web-based interface that will make it easy to learn a musical simple, play it back, and mutate and adapt it. Each theory concept will come with at least one simple to give it authentic cultural context.

It’s an axiom of constructivism that you learn best when you’re enjoying yourself. This might seem obvious, but it represents a break with music education orthodoxy. Music students too often have to do a lot of tedious drilling before they get to try some real music. Even then, those tunes tend to be nursery rhymes or dorky educational pieces. It makes a certain amount of sense to structure lessons this way: real music is complicated and usually well out of reach of beginners. Unfortunately, too many beginners give up before they make it past the nursery rhyme stage.

Beginner-level music teaching nearly always starts at the atomic level: single pitches, note values, time signatures. It seems logical that the smallest units of music would be the simplest ones. But this is not actually true. Beginners conceive of music at a more intermediate level of abstraction: fragments of tunes, moments of tension and resolution, loops and grooves. Self-taught and informally taught musicians do most of their learning at this level. A three-chord song by Bob Marley or Neil Young is a better entry point than the single notes comprising those three chords and the relationship between them.

Here’s a diagram from my masters thesis, adapted from a paper by Jeanne Bamberger:

For more discussion of these ideas, see also Bamberger’s “Developing Musical Structures: Going Beyond The Simples.”

It’s hard to resist the temptation to start at the bottom of the abstraction ladder. Even though I’m a self-taught pop musician, I still instinctively “start at the beginning” whenever I set out to explain something to a student, and have to consciously remind myself to find a mid-level explanation first. I try to think in terms of chemistry. Atoms and their component particles are “simpler” than molecules and complex substances. But most of us don’t have direct experience with atoms. We’re familiar with water and air and rocks and metals. We need to think about water before we can understand hydrogen and oxygen. So it is with music. The musical simples are our molecules and substances, mid-level entry points that scaffold learning of atoms and electrons.

I was unconsciously gathering musical simples long before I heard the term. I was looking for stuff that’s easy to learn, but that’s also substantive enough to work as real music. The good news is that there’s plenty of simple music that isn’t lame. The music of the African diaspora is built on riffs and loops, and jazz and rock and pop are full of easy yet richly satisfying musical ideas. By carefully curating a simples collection, we’re hoping to make life easier for anyone who wants to teach or learn music in an engaging and pleasurable way. Here’s an assortment, shown both in standard notation and MIDI piano roll format.

Classical simples

Handel, Hallelujah Chorus

It’s harder to identify the hooks in classical music than in pop, but this is as hooky as it gets. The MIDI view makes its attractive symmetry jump right out at you.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Otherwise known as “dun-dun-dun DUNNN.” Both the notation and MIDI views present a problem, which is that the phrase doesn’t start on beat one. The “dun-dun-dun” is a pickup, meaning that it comes at the end of the measure, and “DUNNN” comes at the beginning. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s actually super common. We’re working on an alternative visualization system that will hopefully make the concept of the pickup easier on the brain.

Pop simples

Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean”

This is really two simples that fit beautifully together: the keyboard part above, and the bassline below. In their guide to writing pop songs, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty point out that Michael Jackson didn’t write the world’s most amazing choruses, but he did come up with devastating grooves.

Michael Jackson, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”

You could build a pretty solid simples collection if you only drew from Thriller. This phrase was loosely adapted from “Soul Makossa” by Manu Dibango, but not loosely enough to keep Michael from getting sued over it. The African influence is clear: the phrase is just a few pitches, but they’re arranged into a complex syncopated rhythm.

The Beatles, “Hey Jude”

Paul McCartney is another bottomless source of great hooks. The “na na na na” section of “Hey Jude” is longer than the entire rest of the song, but even if it went on for forty-five more minutes, I’d happily continue to listen to it.

McCartney bass

Sir Paul uses this riff on “Taxman” and “Rain.” It also appears in various non-Beatles songs that could quite easily be potential lawsuits.

The Beatles, “Dear Prudence”

Another classic McCartney bassline, from the song considered by John Lennon to be his best. The MIDI view shows the neat descending stairstep pattern, but it doesn’t show how the final B flat lands on A at the beginning of the pattern.

U2, “With Or Without You”

Speaking of great basslines. The entire tune uses this same I-V-vi-IV chord progression. Maybe you’re not familiar with that terminology, but you are most certainly familiar with the progression itself, since it appears in a few other songs.

Jazz simples

Jazz is more complicated than pop, but it’s still a rich source of simples. All jazz improvisation is built out of modular riffs and phrases, and quite a few of the tunes are too.

Duke Ellington, “C Jam Blues”

Duke Ellington is a bottomless source of great hooks. Here’s one of his most minimal tunes, and one of the best: two notes, C and G, that nevertheless form an irresistible melody. I’m discovering a lot of musical simples that just use 1^ and 5^, enough of them that they form a category unto themselves. Other examples include the basslines to “Under Pressure” by Queen and “Song For My Father” by Horace Silver, the chorus of “B*tch Better Have My Money” by Rihanna, and the vintage jingle “By… Mennen.” Since all of them use the same two notes, they’re perfect windows into rhythm.

Miles Davis, “So What”

Like Ellington, Miles Davis was a master of the memorable hook. This is maybe his most famous one. It’s been widely imitated.

Miles Davis, “It’s About That Time”

This theme comes from the best Miles Davis fusion album. Maybe it isn’t a ubiquitous pop meme, but it should be.

All of these simples and more are available here, as music XML and MIDI. If you can suggest some more good ones, please leave them in the comments.

More simples here.