This video recently made the rounds on Facebook: I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I …
Continue reading “Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live”
In my paper about whiteness in music education, I tried to make a point about sampling classical music that my professor was (rightly) confused about. So I’m going to use this post to unpack the idea some more. I was arguing that, while we should definitely decanonize the curriculum, that doesn’t mean we need to …
Continue reading “The orchestra hit as a possible future for classical music”
If you’re the kind of person who reads my blog, then by now you’ve probably seen the video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” If you haven’t seen it, watch now. Be warned that it’s upsetting. Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, is best known as a comedian, a writer, and an actor. He’s an intelligent …
Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …
In this paper, I discuss a rap cypher held during a session of NYU’s CORE Music Program on March 3, 2018. A cypher is a group performance where rappers take turns performing improvised verses. Freestyling is to rap what jam sessions are to jazz: an improvisational form that demands both technical proficiency and a relaxed, …
Continue reading “Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher”
When I was nineteen, I was flipping channels on TV late at night, and I stumbled on this: I had no idea what I was seeing, but I was spellbound. I still can’t exactly verbalize what this music means to me, but I know it means something.
A student interviewed me for a class project on “the impact of music technology on the music industry.” Her questions and my answers follow. How did you get interested in music technology? I got interested in music technology the first time I touched an instrument. So did you! I don’t think we should even have …
Are you trying to learn how to improvise with scales and patterns, but finding it hard to make yourself practice? Do yourself a favor, and practice over actual music. A student asked me to make him a playlist of harmonically static music that’s good for practicing over. I thought I would share it with everyone. …
I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production …
Continue reading “Hip-hop as a tool for hip-hop ethnography”
The Groove Pizza uses geometry to help visualize rhythms. The MusEDLab is planning to create a similar tool for visualizing music theory by merging the aQWERTYon with the Scale Wheel. When you put the twelve pitch classes in a circle, you can connect the dots between different notes in a chord or scale to form shapes. My …
