I made a big spreadsheet with all the chords in it. It’s not all the possible chords, but it’s the ones you most commonly encounter in Western classical, jazz, rock and pop. I also made some videos explaining how chords work, with handy aQWERTYon visualization. Enjoy!
Category Archives: Music
I’m making a bunch of music teaching videos
Partially to prepare for remote teaching my courses, and partially to keep myself from losing my mind, I’m putting a bunch of new videos on YouTube. I’m starting with material I’ve done many times in classes and conference presentations, and then will be branching out into newer stuff as I go. I imagine that these …
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Online music teaching resources
This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health. Big collections: A spreadsheet of online music theory resources and projects, plus my New School syllabus that uses many of these things. A spreadsheet of online music technology resources and projects. The NYSSMA Best Practices Database.
Harmonica Meditation
This post is something new for me: an online prose score, in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros. Harmonica Meditation For unaccompanied ten-hole diatonic harmonica, in any key. Exhale completely. Put the harmonica to your mouth and take a deep breath all the way in, as slowly as you can. I recommend starting at the low …
RIP McCoy Tyner
One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” …
Metrical dissonance in the Gigue from Bach’s E minor English Suite
I’m continuing my journey through rhythmic analyses of canonical classical works with Metrical Displacement and Metrically Dissonant Hemiolas by Channan Willner. One of the pieces that Willner analyzes is the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite No. 5 in E minor, played here by Glenn Gould.
Syncopation in Chopin
I’m trying to get better at understanding classical music, ideally without doing too much Schenkerian analysis. I can hunt for cadences as well as anyone who’s been to music school, and I understand how important they are as structural elements in the Western canon. But there’s more to this music than harmony. It has rhythm …
The Amen Break of snobbery
Garrett Schumann posted on Twitter about Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E major, Op 11 No 5, one of the great one-hit wonders of the Western canon. I didn’t recognize the title and composer, but the music itself was instantly familiar to me as a film score cliche signifying classiness. When I posted that observation, …
Let’s argue about this one weird chord in the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor
I have some aspirations in music theory pedagogy, and toward that end, I’m learning more about Schenkerian analysis. If I’m going to resist it, I should at least be conversant in the thing I’m resisting, right? So I’ve been reading Schenkerian Analysis: Perspectives on Phrase Rhythm, Motive and Form by David Beach. One of his …
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Flava In Ya Ear
It is my duty as a hipster dad to introduce my kids to all the classics of 90s rap, and they have been especially taken with this one. We’ve been enjoying making up our own lyrics to the hook. First we kicked flava in ya nose, then ya mouth, then ya eye. From there we …