Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …
Continue reading “Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants”
I was in a rock/funk/soul band that covered this many years ago. I always loved that one part. You know which part I mean.
In this stressful time, we all need some help attaining inner peace. I’ve been enjoying listening to and thinking about the prelude to Bach’s Violin Partita Number 3 in E major as played by Hopkinson Smith. Beautiful though this is, it’s also a lot of information packed into a small space. I thought it might …
Continue reading “Let’s listen to some extremely slowed down Bach”
Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it. But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever …
I made a big spreadsheet with all the chords in it. It’s not all the possible chords, but it’s the ones you most commonly encounter in Western classical, jazz, rock and pop. I also made some videos explaining how chords work, with handy aQWERTYon visualization. Enjoy!
Partially to prepare for remote teaching my courses, and partially to keep myself from losing my mind, I’m putting a bunch of new videos on YouTube. I’m starting with material I’ve done many times in classes and conference presentations, and then will be branching out into newer stuff as I go. I imagine that these …
Continue reading “I’m making a bunch of music teaching videos”
This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health. Big collections: A spreadsheet of online music theory resources and projects, plus my New School syllabus that uses many of these things. A spreadsheet of online music technology resources and projects. The NYSSMA Best Practices Database.
This post is something new for me: an online prose score, in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros. Harmonica Meditation For unaccompanied ten-hole diatonic harmonica, in any key. Exhale completely. Put the harmonica to your mouth and take a deep breath all the way in, as slowly as you can. I recommend starting at the low …
One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” …
I’m continuing my journey through rhythmic analyses of canonical classical works with Metrical Displacement and Metrically Dissonant Hemiolas by Channan Willner. One of the pieces that Willner analyzes is the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite No. 5 in E minor, played here by Glenn Gould.
