A nice thing happened with my music theory songs

A Twitter acquaintance wrote me this series of DMs:

I am so glad he had that reaction. I haven’t been pushing my music theory songs too hard because I wasn’t sure about their value to anyone other than me. I did use some of them in my New School music theory class last semester, but I was hesitant about using the whole thing. This message was a helpful indication that I’m onto something and should lean into it. 

I started making these tracks because I believe that music theory is best learned from actual music. Yes, you want to work through abstract symbolic representations too, but those are very difficult to understand and retain unless they sit on top of a foundation of aural learning and intuition. You will have a much easier time internalizing the diatonic seventh chords if you have already heard and played a lot of music that uses the diatonic seventh chords. I collect real-world musical examples of all the concepts that I teach, but I also wanted some music with the concepts at the center, systematically laid out. I can point you to plenty of songs that use seventh chords, but there is no song that uses, you know, all of them. Then I realized that through the magic of Ableton Live, it would be pretty easy to just make one, and I could put the whole thing over the Funky Drummer break so it would be fun to listen to.

So here’s what I’m imagining with the Theory Songs. Say you want to learn how to go through all the major keys around the circle of fifths. You can listen to the song and absorb it by osmosis, or actively practice over it with your instrument. I feel especially excited about the songs that compare different swing feels and just intonation tuning systems, because there is hardly any pedagogical material about these things available at all, much less material that is set to breakbeats. 

I do not have the typical credentials to teach college-level music theory. My PhD is in music education, not theory. I do believe that having a background in critical pedagogy is extremely valuable for teaching music theory, because we don’t want to keep reproducing the white racial frame. I was very pleasantly surprised when the New School offered to have me teach a theory class, since I had originally applied for a music technology position. They liked my critical pedagogy angle, it is very much in keeping with their institutional ethos, and they have been wonderfully supportive of me. The students have responded well, too. But it remains to be seen whether any of this will be “institutionally legible” elsewhere. Maybe someday my groove-centric approach will be a standard course offering, but we are not there yet.

In the meantime, there’s a whole universe of music theory learners who are not in university music departments, like the people who read this blog, and I’m happy to serve them. I have developed some online courses for Soundfly and teaching resources for Ableton, and have a couple of books about learning groove-based music in the pipeline. I worked on the Theory aQWERTYon with the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, too, and have some more ideas in that vein that I would like to develop. I’m imagining a whole pedagogical ecosystem around the theory songs. Whether that ecosystem is going to live in an institution, or in a private-sector business, or just here on this web site, is something I am actively trying to figure out.