The twelve-bar blues is not the only blues form. There is also a whole world of one-chord blues grooves over drones, pedal tones and static riffs. Howlin’ Wolf has several classic songs that follow this model, including “Spoonful“, “Wang Dang Doodle“, and “Smokestack Lightning.” Guitarist Hubert Sumlin came up with the iconic riff. The track …
Author Archives: Ethan
How guitarists learn music theory
This is me, rehearsing an Allman Brothers song with my stepbrother Kenny for my stepdad’s funeral last summer. If you are a music theory teacher interested in reaching guitarists, here’s some background on my own music learning that might be illuminating. My journey is a pretty typical one for a rock guitarist, except for the …
Research statement
I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my research statement. Also see my teaching statement. I have three main areas of research interest: the teaching and learning of rhythm and groove; the challenges of hip-hop pedagogy; and expanding the teaching of harmony to include groove-based musics, particularly the …
Nahre Sol introduces Billie Eilish to the classical canon
In this fascinating video, Nahre Sol composes accompaniment for an isolated Billie Eilish vocal in the styles of various canonical composers. The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due …
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The blues and the harmonic series – a visual guide
Does the harmony of the blues come from the natural overtone series? Is it a just intonation system that later got shoehorned into Western twelve-tone equal temperament? Whether the blues comes from just intonation, or just intonation happens to sound like the blues, this is a rich and promising avenue of inquiry, both for understanding …
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The problem with just intonation – a visual guide
Tuning is the final frontier of my musical understanding. I start reading about it, and then I hit a big table of fractions or logarithms and my eyes immediately glaze over. However, tuning is important and interesting! So I continue to struggle on. Fortunately, as with so many music theory concepts, the right computer software …
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Modes from light to dark around the chromatic circle
People find the diatonic modes confusing. They are confusing! But they’re also wonderfully useful. So one of the goals of my music theory songs is to make the modes less confusing (or, at least, to make them confusing in a different way.) Some of the confusion comes from the fact that you conventionally see the …
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The Well-Tempered (and not-so-well-tempered) Clavier
Bach wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier as a showcase for a new tuning system that could play in all twelve major and all twelve minor keys. Up until that point, the various European tuning systems only worked for some keys, not all of them. If you were in or near the key of C, you were …
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Teaching statement
I am finishing my dissertation soon and am applying for full-time academic jobs. Here’s my teaching statement. It’s adapted from the first two chapters of Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Also see my research statement. I have taught as an adjunct at New York University’s Steinhardt School, The New School’s …
Just intonation and key changes
Western people like two things in harmony: intervals derived from the natural overtone series, and the ability to play in multiple keys. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to do both of these things within the same tuning system. If you want to use just intonation intervals derived from harmonics, then they will not work in every …