The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School

Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of the Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in or near 1720, performed by the guitarist Christopher Parkening.

If you would like to hear the piece played on its intended instrument, here’s a performance by Viktoria Mullova.

A Partita is a set of dance pieces for a single instrument, all in the same key. You can think of it as being the Baroque equivalent of an album. The Chaconne is the last and longest “song” on the “album” of Bach’s D minor partita. It doesn’t sound much like dance music! Here’s a chaconne from about a hundred years earlier to give you a sense of its original vibe:

To hear how Bach’s Chaconne would sound if it were dance music, I added beats to the Christopher Parkening recording using Ableton Live:

We will be spending more time with this piece of music over the course of the semester.

Jazz has undergone a similar evolution from dance music to more abstract, contemplative music. Here’s “Take The A Train”, written in 1939 by frequent Duke Ellington collaborator Billy Strayhorn and performed by the Ellington Orchestra in a movie in 1943. It was a very popular dance tune at the time.

Here’s Duke Ellington with John Coltrane in 1962 playing Ellington’s tune “Take The Coltrane” (which he probably wrote in the cab on the way to the recording session.) Even though it has a similar rhythm and structure to “Take The A Train”, it is not dance music.

And here is Coltrane playing some jazz that is not dance-oriented at all, a duet with the drummer Rashid Ali called “Mars”, recorded shortly before Coltrane’s death in 1967.

My example of more contemporary dance music is “Around the World” by Daft Punk from 1997. Notice how predictable the form is, how you can feel each section change coming, even if you aren’t listening with your full attention.

Here’s an R&B tune, “One in a Million” by Aaliyah from 1996. (I’m from Gen X, all my pop examples are from the 90s.) The track has a predictable dance-like structure, but it’s slower, and the rhythms and melodies are more complex at the micro level.

Finally, here’s a beat-driven piece of music that is very dance-unfriendly due to its odd time signature and densely angular melody, “Birds of Fire” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra from 1973.

We will be starting the class off by practicing critical listening, paying attention to the surface features of the music, to song forms and structures, to loudness and tempo and soundscape. As we do, we will be thinking about the difference between “pop” and “art” music, what features of the music make us hear it that way, and what their cultural associations are.