I got an unexpected email today from the legendary composer/remixer John Oswald, whose Plunderphonics project was a major inspiration for me. (For example, check out “Dab,” “Power,” and the terrifying “Pretender.”) He told me that in the course of researching the connection between the second movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 and the haunting …
Continue reading “John Oswald said he likes my Stevie Wonder/Laurie Anderson mashup”
In my first official interview with each of my three dissertation research participants, I asked them to answer the question, “What is hip-hop education?” To analyze their responses, I edited their answers down to their most salient moments and remix them by laying them over related music. The next step was to compare the remixed …
I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See …
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a …
Continue reading “Toni Blackman interview remix – What is hip-hop education?”
Join me and Will Kuhn every Sunday at 5 pm on Twitch! We talk lesson planning, music tech, beatmaking, songwriting, and the joys of teaching music in a pandemic.
There is no corpus of music I know better than the albums and concert recordings of the Grateful Dead. Some people memorize the works of Shakespeare; I, for better or for worse, spent my youth memorizing the works of Jerry. This puts me in a great position to sample and remix them. However, while I’ve …
Before he wrecked his brain with heroin in the 1980s, Jerry Garcia was my favorite guitarist in the world. I was so saturated in his music during my key guitar-learning years that now everything I play tends to sound like him, up to and including Bach violin partitas. Here’s my single favorite four-bar passage of …
For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits …
Diatonic chords from the C major scale:
Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently. https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697 I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.
