I wrote a book with Will Kuhn and now it exists in real life! You can buy it from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Powell’s, Apple Books, and many other places. The foreword is by Adam Neely. Electronic Music School is a complete guide to starting and running a creative music technology program. We include many …
Author Archives: Ethan
The great scale flowchart
Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music. I group scales into three broad …
The blues and the harmonic series
In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series …
Kind Hearted Woman Blues
So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice. Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans …
Blues tonality update
I have been doing a major overhaul of my blues tonality post. It now cites more literature and has a more logical structure. The post is my best attempt at a complete description of blues harmony, its history, and its role (or lack thereof) in music theory pedagogy. I hope you find it useful.
Boogie Chillen
Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made. The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty …
Brokedown Palace
My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic: For me, “Brokedown Palace” represents the high point of the Dead’s acoustic folkie side. On American Beauty, …
Did Lorde rip off George Michael?
Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar! The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.” But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the …
Kicking out the JAMS
That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. Email me if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF.
Pieces vs Songs vs Grooves
In preparation for making a bunch of new YouTube videos, I have been thinking about Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves. It’s a useful scheme for thinking about pop, but it doesn’t cover everything in Western music. We need a third category for linear through-composed music. So here’s my proposal: all of the music …