This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.
The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.
Here are some reference materials for the Song Factory.
We spent some quality time on the Beatles in class, and I wrote some song analyses partially as class prep and partially for my own enlightenment.
My older kid got deep into learning David Bowie songs this year. I analyzed a bunch of them so we could play them together, and several of them also turned out to be relevant to the Song Factory as well.
- “The Man Who Sold The World“
- “Moonage Daydream“
- “Life On Mars?“
- “Changes“
- “Ashes to Ashes“
- “As The World Falls Down“
- “Absolute Beginners“
Here are some reference materials I wrote for Musical Borrowing.
- Dies Irae
- The Beastie Boys, James Newton and Phonographic Orality
- Scientist Rids The World Of The Evil Curse Of The Vampires
The class was mainly motivated by the study of hip-hop sampling, and I wrote some track analyses for class prep.
- “Don’t Sweat The Technique“
- “Eye Know“
- “Little Simz and Ramsey Lewis“
- “Ahmad Jamal and hip-hop“
- “Can I Kick It?“
I also continued teaching music tech for music educators, and I wrote a couple of new explainers for those classes.
So now for the groove pedagogy situation. I have some larger ambitions with the study of groove. I think there’s a need for a music theory textbook about how rhythm, harmony and form work in genres like funk, dance and hip-hop. I wrote a proposal for a groove-oriented theory text, and there is some publisher interest, but I have to do a lot of revising and reshaping. The big problem is figuring out who would buy and use such a book. I don’t even have a place where I can teach a groove-centric musicology or theory class myself, much less a sense of how to find a critical mass of other teachers who would want to buy a groove theory book. Heather Fortune and I do have a lot of instrumental methods and compositions for school ensembles in the pipeline, those will be coming out from F-Flat Books at some point in 2024. In the meantime, I continue to write about groove, both because I enjoy doing it and because I am hopeful that an audience will present itself if I just keep at it.
- Polymeter and polyrhythm
- Teaching swing
- Building the Funky Drummer break
- Building the Amen break
- “There Was A Time (I Got To Move)“
- “God Make Me Funky“
- “Baby, I Love You“
- “Rock Steady“
- “Pusherman“
- “I Heard It Through The Grapevine“
- “Freedom Jazz Dance“
- “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing“
- “Love Rollercoaster” and “Genius of Love”
Finally, I wrote two dissertation-related things this year.
- “Building Hip-Hop Educators” – a book chapter collab with my music education inspiration Toni Blackman
- A ten page summary of my dissertation for a thing I applied for – if you are curious about my research and don’t want to read three hundred pages, this is for you.
Looking at all of this collected in one place, it does seem like a lot of material. Analyzing music is easy and fun for me! Finding institutional settings to do this work is much harder. Hopefully that will get easier.