Ethan’s Trax is an iTunes playlist I maintain that includes all of the music I’ve ever recorded. Well, more accurately, it’s all of the music that I care to be reminded of. I haven’t included every draft and dead end. But if a track has any artistic or sentimental value whatsoever to me, it’s in Ethan’s Trax. As of this writing, …
Category Archives: Music
Musical simples – Possibly Maybe
I’ve said it before and will say it again: Björk is the best thing to happen to contemporary music theory education. No matter what weird scale you’re trying to teach, she’s used it in a catchy, memorable tune. “Possibly Maybe” uses two weird scales: Lydian mode, in the A section (the verses), and melodic minor scale, in …
Musical simples – Star Wars
John Williams’ Star Wars score owes a lot to the heroic symphonies of his favorite nineteenth century German composers, from Beethoven through Wagner. The main title theme is as Germanic as it gets, a straightforward military march on the B-flat major scale. Like all great pop hooks, this one is simple, but it isn’t dumb. …
Victor Wooten teaches music teaching
Victor Wooten is an absurdly proficient bassist best known for his work with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. There was a period in my life when the Flecktones’ music was my favorite thing in the world. That period is long behind me, but I have a lingering fondness for their amiably nerdy sound. Recently, I came across a TED talk that Vic …
Musical simples: Stir It Up
The I-IV-V chord progression is one of the cornerstones of Western music, uniting everything from Mozart to Missy Elliott. Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” is as clear and concise an introduction to I-IV-V as you could ask for. The song uses three chords: A, D, and E. They’re shown in the diagram below as turquoise, …
Musical simples: Army Of Me
Björk did the music theory world a huge favor by writing a pop hit entirely in Locrian mode, since it’s really hard to find a good real-world example of it otherwise. You don’t see too many melodies written entirely, or even partially, in Locrian mode. It’s not a friendly scale. That mostly has to do with its …
Musical Simples: Once In A Lifetime
“Once In A Lifetime” is a simple but remarkable tune based on a simple but remarkable scale: the major pentatonic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98AJUj-qxHI Like its cousin the minor pentatonic scale, major pentatonic is found in just about every world musical culture. It’s also incredibly ancient. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a paleontologist plays an …
Musical Simples: Superstition
If you had to explain funk to a visitor from outer space, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” would be a great place to start. Aside from the refrains at the end of each verse, the entire tune consists of variations on a single two-bar clavinet riff on the E-flat minor pentatonic scale. The scale might have a …
Here’s what’s cooking with the NYU MusEDLab
I’m a proud member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, a research group that crosses the disciplines of music education, technology, and design. Here’s an overview of our many ongoing projects.
Resisting imperialism through secular devotion
I have struggled for years to articulate why I like the music descending from Africa so much better than the music descending from Europe. I’m a typical American in this respect. Every genre that the mainstream enjoys takes its rhythms and loop structures from the African diaspora: rock, hip-hop, and EDM, of course, but country too, and pop, which …
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