“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing: Music Theory Songs by Ethan Hein Hear a track where the timefeel gradually changes from straight to swing and back. Here’s an explanation of …
Category Archives: Politics
The NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum
This year, for the first time, I’m co-teaching the NYU Steinhardt Music Education Popular Music Practicum with Dr Kimberly McCord. Kimberly is doing the first half of the semester, and I’m doing the second half. She’s covering live performance and improvisation in the rock and “modern band” idioms, and I’m doing songwriting and remixing in …
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Songs vs Grooves
Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves. “Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove. In structural terms, a groove is a small musical …
Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead
Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of …
John Oswald said he likes my Stevie Wonder/Laurie Anderson mashup
I got an unexpected email today from the legendary composer/remixer John Oswald, whose Plunderphonics project was a major inspiration for me. (For example, check out “Dab,” “Power,” and the terrifying “Pretender.”) He told me that in the course of researching the connection between the second movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 and the haunting …
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Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of …
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Adam Neely video on rap covers
I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See …
Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?
For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio. Dissertation …
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Mothership Connection
In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to …
What does it mean to remix the classical canon
Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently. https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697 I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.