In this episode, I use “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder (1973) as a jumping off point to contemplate the headache of naming notes and chords in keys with a lot of flats and sharps in them. The circle of fifths is a lie by Ethan Hein My struggles to learn “Don’t …
Category Archives: Music Theory
Thelonious Monk plays the blues
Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious …
I wrote a song about chromatic embellishments
There are two kinds of embellishing tones, the ones from inside the key and the ones from outside. The outside ones are called chromatic embellishments, and that name is appropriate; you get the most color from careful application of the “wrong” notes.
End-accented phrases make melodies sound cool
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness …
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Explaining suspensions
In a previous post, I listed examples of melodic suspensions. But I didn’t do a very good job of explaining how they work. So I will rectify that here.
Bring It On Down To My House
I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the …
Visualizing secondary dominants
In my MusicRadar column honoring Roberta Flack, I thought of a new analogy for secondary dominant chords, and I figured that I should work it into a new explainer with some new graphics. So, if you are having trouble understanding how these chords work, read on. Secondary dominant chords solve a specific problem: how to …
Ray Charles sings “You Are My Sunshine”
I am mildly obsessed with this recording, both as a work of art and as a music teaching resource. While I have mentioned this track several times on here, I haven’t really dug into the details. So it’s time to change that. There’s a lot to talk about: the genre, the chords, the melody, the …
Harmonic rhythm in two-chord shuttles
We devote a lot of attention in music theory pedagogy to chords. But it isn’t enough to look at what the chords are; you have to consider when they are too. The placement of chord changes in musical time is called harmonic rhythm. The easiest way to understand this idea is to look at songs …
My year in pop aural skills teaching
This year, in addition to teaching my first NYU pop music theory class, I also taught two semesters of pop aural skills. If you didn’t go through a university music program, you may not know what aural skills class involves. Traditionally, you identify chords and intervals by ear, practice sight-singing, and do dictation (meaning, you …