Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just …
Continue reading “I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures”
I am approaching my New School songwriting class differently this semester: rather than having students write songs in particular styles, I am having them write using particular forms and structures. For example, for the blues unit, they don’t have to write in a blues style, but they do have to use the twelve-bar blues form. …
This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I …
Continue reading “The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory”
This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard! In this post, I …
I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several …
Continue reading “Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic”
As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and …
What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In …
Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”
The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, …
The movie Ghost World tells us that people who are obsessed with old blues records are creeps, but also that old blues records are worth being obsessed with. There’s a pivotal scene where Enid, the young protagonist, hears “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, and reacts to it in much the same way that …
In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …
