Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas …
Category Archives: Autobio
Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her. If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the …
The tale of my PhD
As of last week, I am the proud recipient of a doctorate in music education from NYU. It was quite a journey! (Isn’t it always?) The official part took me six years, but the whole process really took more like ten years, or twenty, or thirty, depending on how you count. In this post I’ll …
Who’s got two thumbs and a PhD in music education?
This guy! You can read my dissertation here.
Theory Hacks with Ableton
I’m happy to announce the release of my first project for the good folks at Ableton, a Classroom Project called Theory Hacks. It’s a set of free resources for educators who want to teach music theory and songwriting/composition to beginners using Live. In this post, I explain the pedagogical motivations for the project.
Technology Trends in Music Education
This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am …
My current Intro to Music Technology syllabus
There is no required text for this class; all of the readings are online. However, if you are a music education major or you plan to teach music technology, I recommend buying Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity by Will Kuhn and myself.
Things I wrote this year
I wrote a tremendous amount this year, due to a combination of pandemic-induced academic underemployment and pandemic-induced confinement to quarters. The big headlines are that I published a book with Will Kuhn, and completed a draft of my doctoral dissertation. The book we really wrote in prior years and just did the final revisions and …
Dual tonicity in a classic klezmer tune
I’m rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm and very much enjoying the work of music supervisor Steven Rasch. In season five, episode eight, Larry pretends to be an Orthodox Jew to win over the head of the Kidney Consortium. To soundtrack the scene where Larry first meets the guy, Rasch chose a classic klezmer tune, “Tanz Tanz …
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 …