I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book …
Category Archives: Writing
I wrote another rap song to inspire my Pop Practicum students
I’m making my students in the NYU Popular Music Practicum write and perform original rap verses. To encourage them, I wrote one too, like I did last year. The samples are from Erroll Garner’s recording of “Close To You” by the Carpenters.
Things I wrote this year
I wrote a tremendous amount this year, due to a combination of pandemic-induced academic underemployment and pandemic-induced confinement to quarters. The big headlines are that I published a book with Will Kuhn, and completed a draft of my doctoral dissertation. The book we really wrote in prior years and just did the final revisions and …
What is Hip-Hop Education, the remix
In my first official interview with each of my three dissertation research participants, I asked them to answer the question, “What is hip-hop education?” To analyze their responses, I edited their answers down to their most salient moments and remix them by laying them over related music. The next step was to compare the remixed …
Toni Blackman 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 Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a …
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Will Kuhn and I finished our book
For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits …
Hip-hop glossary
This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to hip-hop slang and vocabulary. Such a thing would be impossible, especially because the culture is constantly producing new terms. This list will necessarily be out of date by the time you read it. My purpose is to introduce the most important musical terms, along with …
My year in blogging
Two big things happened in my academic life this year: I wrote a dissertation proposal (which is not quite done yet), and I developed and taught a music theory course at the New School. Both of these projects featured heavily on this blog. Here are some high points.
Sound writing with my New School students
I just completed the first week of Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. We began the semester with critical listening. Before having the students analyze recorded music, I had them warm up by doing some writing about the sound of a mundane environment. As it turns out, New School students are terrific and …
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Rob Walker on The Art of Noticing
Rob Walker has a new book out. I’m in it! You should buy and read it. Rob interviewed me about critical listening, that is, listening closely to music to try to mentally isolate the different instruments/sounds, and understand their relationships to each other, and to the whole. Critical listening can reveal whole new dimensions to …