My daughter is getting deep into the Beatles, so I’m listening to them a lot with her. I don’t usually listen to the Beatles all that much, because I know their songs backwards and forwards and inside out. But it’s always nice to come back to the songs in a new context, and it’s rare …
Category Archives: Composition
What’s Going On
For a discussion of musical form in Contemporary Music Theories, we talked about Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” The multitrack stems are in circulation, and they are quite a revelation. Here’s a nice walkthrough with Questlove and Motown executive Harry Weinger.
Bach’s mysterious Sarabande
While learning and learning about the Prelude to Bach’s G minor Lute Suite, I also came into contact with the suite’s Sarabande. This piece is famous among music theorists, because while it’s only forty measures long, those forty measures are action-packed, harmonically speaking. Here’s a performance by Evangelina Mascardi. I appreciate that Mascardi doesn’t play …
Bach’s Lute Suite in G minor
I don’t get a lot of music-related correspondence on LinkedIn, so I was surprised when a stranger wrote me a very nice message there about my deep dive into the Bach Chaconne. He mentioned that he was learning the prelude to the Lute Suite in G Minor, BWV 995, and that he liked Göran Söllscher’s …
Bach Anxiety
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 …
Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues
There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41. Before we can get into the details of this note and what …
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Groove: an aesthetic of measured time
As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, …
Human Behaviour
Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them! This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video …
I Wanna Be Your Lover
In addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the thread, first because he once tipped Quest $100 for having the audacity to slip Miles Davis’ “Milestones” into a DJ set. …
Crosseyed And Painless
Since I’m stuck in my apartment with Covid for a while, looks like I have plenty of time to continue my Talking Heads series. Here’s one of their funkiest and most Afrobeat-sounding tracks. David Byrne always speak-sings to an extent, but this song has an actual rap verse (“Facts are simple and facts are straight…”) …