It has been a big year for my writing life. My work life continues to consist of badly paid contingent faculty work, but hope springs eternal. So here’s a list of things I wrote and what I am hoping happens as a result.
I taught music theory and aural skills classes in NYU Steinhardt’s new popular music sequence, and wrote a lot of teaching materials for them. Here are some meta-level thoughts on the melodic-harmonic divorce, modern band music theory, and blues harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory. Maybe NYU will give some more theory classes, or maybe someone else in the NYC area needs some innovative pop pedagogy.
I got hired by MusicRadar to write a monthly column analyzing current and classic songs. Sometimes they have me write about things I would have written about anyway, like the most iconic Phil Lesh basslines or a Beyoncé song with strong blues roots. But they also sometimes assign me to write about people outside my usual listening tastes, like Oasis or Sabrina Carpenter. Beyond the pleasure of getting paid to do this, the experience has helped me refine my general-audience prose style. Maybe somebody will want to collect these columns into a book.
Everyone has apparently stopped reading blogs, so I started publishing my posts on Substack too. I wanted to see if people would voluntarily sign up for paid subscriptions even if I kept publishing everything here for free. Apparently, the answer is yes, some of them will. It’s not a huge number of subscriptions yet, I’m not Ted Gioia, but it’s not nothing either. Next year I’ll try out a podcast too, because why not.
I wrote many analyses of Grateful Dead songs with an eye toward writing something longer about the band. There has been an enormous amount written about the Dead as a social, cultural and economic phenomenon, but there’s not as much out there about their actual music. I want to find a publisher for this; the target audience is guitar-playing dads who are curious about music theory but who don’t know a lot about it.
Also, eons ago I wrote a book chapter with Toni Blackman about hip-hop education. That finally got published this year. The wheels of academia turn at their own pace.
Happy new year!