I’m recently home from Ableton’s stupendous “summit for music makers,” and I’m still mentally unpacking it all. Loop was quite a different experience from last year, when Ableton held it in their home city of Berlin. This year, they moved it to Los Angeles to make it easier for people in Latin America and the …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Making music with students’ found sounds
Every semester, I have my music technology students do a project using found sound. They record environmental sounds with their phones, and then they create tracks that incorporate those sounds somehow. The only rule is that they have to use at least one found sound–it doesn’t have to be their own. Otherwise, they can use …
White people with acoustic instruments covering rap songs
I turned this post into an academic journal article with proper citations–click to read it in Visions of Research in Music Education. Also see the Adam Neely video! White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial …
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Funky Minuet in G major
In my continuing quest to learn the classical canon through remixing with Ableton Live, I’ve taken on Bach’s Minuet in G major. Which is apparently not by Bach at all, but rather by some guy named Christian Petzold. Live and learn. A minuet is a dance, but in 2018, it’s hard to dance in triple meter. …
Simple songs
I’m interested in a particular kind of pop song: mainstream-ish tracks that are so minimal in their melodic or lyrical content that they barely qualify as “songs,” yet manage to still be musically compelling. My paradigmatic examples: “That’s The Way (I Like It)” by KC and the Sunshine Band “Around The World” by Daft Punk …
Dissertation update
For the past two years, I’ve been working on a doctorate in music education at NYU. I’ve finished my coursework, and after I do my candidacy exam this fall, I’ll be ABD (All But Dissertation, as the academics say.) (Update: I passed!) I’ve spent the summer laying the groundwork for the dissertation, and thought you …
Scratching “This Is America”
One of my projects for this summer is to realize my decades-old ambition to learn how to scratch. I borrowed a Korg Kaoss DJ controller from a friend, downloaded Serato, and have been fumbling with it for a week now. The Kaoss DJ leaves much to be desired. The built-in Kaoss Pad is cool, but otherwise …
Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live
This video recently made the rounds on Facebook: I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I …
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The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music
In my paper about whiteness in music education, I tried to make a point about sampling classical music that my professor was (rightly) confused about. So I’m going to use this post to unpack the idea some more. I was arguing that, while we should definitely decanonize the curriculum, that doesn’t mean we need to …
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Teaching whiteness in music class
Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …