Music ed folks! If you need some PD credit this summer, check out the online Annual Back-to-School Symposium presented by the good people at F-Flat Books. Heather Fortune and I are doing a session on groove and improvisation in ensemble classes. The lineup includes some of the people I admire most in the field: Brandi …
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In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …
The best way to teach the diatonic modes is to compare them to each other in parallel. One way to do that is to just run up and down them scalewise, but that isn’t very musically satisfying. So I thought, how about putting a familiar melody into all the modes? I wanted one that touches …
There are two ways to understand intervals: the right way, and the way I learned them. Before we get into that, let me point you to some good resources for learning the right way. I like the online tutorials by Robert Hutchinson, Chelsey Hamm and Bryn Hughes, musictheory.net and musicca.com. I really love Nate May’s visual …
Sit down at the piano and play the chords C and F in root position, back and forth, like so: (C E G) to (F A C). Pretty clunky! Now invert the C chord; that is, move the bottom note up an octave. Alternate that version of the C chord with the F chord, like …
Kids need to learn how to read staff notation. However, they would rather look at the MIDI piano roll. My question is, why not show them both? Each view has its own affordances. Staff notation is more human-readable and space-efficient, but the piano roll is more discoverable for beginners. The staff doesn’t show microrhythmic subtleties, …
The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live. The song’s tempo ranges …
(Meta-level note: I rewrite this explainer every few years and now that I have a couple of new music theory gigs, I am rewriting it yet again.) Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony: conflict, surprise, defiance of expectation. If you place your rhythmic accents where listeners expect them, then the music gets …
Minor keys are complicated, because there are so many different minor scales. Major keys seem simpler, because there is only the one major scale. At least, that is how things worked in Western Europe between 1700 and 1900. In present-day Anglo-American pop, though, we need to expand our idea of what a major key is.
I had fun with this one. I love Tom Breihan’s Stereogum column The Number Ones, in which he is reviewing every number one Billboard hit in chronological order. His best columns are often about the most insubstantial or annoying songs, because then he can apply a cool objectivity to the processes of the pop machine. …
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