Music theory prankster Robert Komaniecki tried to ruin “Over The Rainbow” by singing it in C Phrygian mode: @robertkomaniecki Where are my Gregorian chant-heads at #musicmajor #musictheory #choir ♬ original sound – Robert Komaniecki My son’s reaction to this: “Waaaaggghhh.”
Category Archives: Music Teaching
The final day of the Song Factory course
Last week we brought my first New School Song Factory class to its conclusion. I have taught songwriting many times before, but it was always as a means to learning something else: music theory, production, progressive pedagogical methods. This was my first opportunity to teach songwriting for the sake of songwriting. The final session ended …
Building the Amen break
I continue to refine my new groove pedagogy method: teach a complicated rhythm by presenting a very simplified version of it, then a less simplified version, then a less simplified version, until you converge on the groove in its full nuance. Imagine a pixelated image gradually gaining resolution. My goal with this is to have …
Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use …
A nice thing happened with my music theory songs
A Twitter acquaintance wrote me this series of DMs: I am so glad he had that reaction. I haven’t been pushing my music theory songs too hard because I wasn’t sure about their value to anyone other than me. I did use some of them in my New School music theory class last semester, but …
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Building Hip-Hop Educators – new book chapter abstract
Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing …
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Where do jazz standards come from?
My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz. In this post, I collect standards of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these …
The Song Factory course
I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …
My year in writing
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book …
Blues harmony primer
For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise. See also this post on blues melodies. How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes does it include? What are blue notes? Why does it sound …