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 …
Category Archives: Music Theory
My year in pop music theory teaching
See also: my year in pop aural skills teaching This year I taught my first theory class in NYU’s new popular music sequence. It was not my first music theory class, or my first pop music class, but it was the first one in a university-level sequence dedicated specifically to pop. I think it mostly …
Jason Yust on the racist history of tonality
I haven’t done any culture war material lately, but Jason Yust recently published an article in the Journal of Music Theory with the title “Tonality and Racism“, and I couldn’t not respond. The arguments in the paper are relevant to my teaching life in NYU’s new and wonderful pop theory and aural skills sequence. These classes …
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Stormy Monday
Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented …
ii-V-I
My NYU pop theory class is going from non-functional harmony to the most functional harmony there is, the ii-V-I cadence. It’s subdominant to dominant to tonic, Western tonal harmony the way God and Beethoven intended.
Adding vocal harmony to a Tears for Fears song
My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song: Here’s the acapella. I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a …
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Identifying chromatic embellishments
Embellishing tones are non-chord tones that are still within the key or mode. Chromatic embellishments are notes from outside the key or mode. They are easy to spot because they sound characteristically “weird”, or, at least, more colorful than the other notes around them. Thus the “chromatic” part – the word comes from chroma, the …
Cumberland Blues
Phil Lesh’s passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I’ve been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is “Cumberland Blues.” Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense …
Identifying suspensions
Today in pop aural skills, we identified suspensions, that is, melodies that place unexpected non-chord tones on strong beats, before resolving to the expected chord tones. These are melodic suspensions, which are not the same thing as sus4 or sus2 chords, but they are related concepts. Western European classical theory has a lot of clear …
A nice Jerry line from the Cornell Scarlet>Fire
My last post was a study of Scarlet>Fire from 5/8/77, and I don’t feel that I completely exhausted the topic. I want to zoom in on a particularly nice line that Jerry plays at the 11:53 mark on the released version: Jerry’s playing is beguiling throughout this whole recording, but there is so much of …
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