This fall, I am teaching Technology in Music Education at Western Illinois University. The students are in-service music teachers who are working toward masters degrees. Here’s my syllabus.
I have left out administrative details and university boilerplate. Feel free to use any of this as you see fit, but if you do, please tell me, I’m always interested to hear.
Continue reading “Technology in Music Education – updated syllabus”
Is this the coolest pre-Revolver Beatles song? In terms of notes on the page, it very well could be.
My daughter and I managed to sing the harmony parts together the other night. She has a good ear for a seven year old, but also, the harmonies in that song are so clear and intuitive, it’s like they want to help you sing themselves.
I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!
The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.
I am always on the lookout for clear examples of blue thirds, pitches in between the standard equal-tempered major and minor thirds. I heard Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” recently, and the vocal melody grabbed my ear. (Be advised that the first verse uses the n-word.)
You can hear the pitches in the vocal melody even more clearly in the acapella.
I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”
That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.
When I teach swing, I like to play examples of the same piece of music with and without swing for ease of comparison. My favorite comparison is between “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more than change the time feel; he also changes the instrumentation and structure. I wanted to find an example where the same music repeated identically with and without swing. The problem is that so far as I can tell, no such piece of music exists. But then I realized that it would be easy to make this piece of music myself, by warping something out in Ableton Live and applying different groove settings.
I decided to use Bach’s Prelude No. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier as performed by Glenn Gould, because it’s a slow, steady stream of straight sixteenth notes. I added the drum intro from “Soul Love” by David Bowie, which is also laid back straight sixteenths. With piano notes and drum hits on every sixteenth note subdivision, the effect of swinging those sixteenth notes would be maximally obvious. My original thought was to alternate straight with swung sections. As I was trying different swing feels from the Ableton Groove Pool, I realized that it would be better to cycle through several different feels, rather than alternating straight and swing. After some experimentation, here’s what I came up with.
At the beginning of the track, you’re hearing Glenn Gould and the Bowie beat with their original straight time feel. Over the next thirty seconds, the swing ratio gradually increases until it is a very wide 71%. Then it gradually decreases until by the 1:00 mark, the feel is completely straight. The swing increases again until it peaks at about 1:30, and then straightens back out by the end of the track.
The swing percentage system was the invention of Roger Linn, who first used it in the Linn LM-1. Linn’s system has become the most common way to specify swing settings in drum machines and DAWs. To understand what the percentages mean, you need to know some terminology. A measure of 4/4 time is divided into four beats, each of which is a quarter note long. Each of those quarter notes is divided into two eighth notes, which are the basic pulse unit in most current American groove genres. Each eighth note pulse unit is subdivided into two sixteenth notes. The first sixteenth note in each pair is called the onbeat subdivision, and the second one in the pair is called the offbeat subdivision. To make your drum machine swing, all you need to do is make the onbeat subdivisions longer, and make the offbeat subdivisions correspondingly shorter. The result will sound extremely fake, because there is a lot more to swing than just stretching and shrinking your subdivisions uniformly. But because drum machine swing is so simplified, it’s a good pedagogical starting point.
Anyway, the swing percentage represents the onbeat subdivision’s length relative to the overall pulse unit.
Most groove-based American music of the past hundred years uses between 50% and 67% swing. That said, you are certainly allowed to use wider swing if you want; jazz drummers sometimes get up to 75% or beyond at slow tempos.
While Roger Linn’s percentage system is widely used, it’s not the only convention out there. Some DAWs use percentages with a different scale. Digital Performer uses 50% for straight time like Linn does, but it defines triplet swing as 100% rather than 67%. (This is also the convention we used for the Groove Pizza.) FL Studio uses 0% for straight time and 100% for triplets, which is the system I find appealingly intuitive, even if the numbers no longer directly describe the length of the onbeats and offbeats.
Musicologists who study swing usually talk about it in terms of onbeat-to-offbeat ratios (also called beat-upbeat ratios). In these terms, straight time is 1:1, moderately heavy swing is 1.5:1, and triplet swing is 2:1. Milton Mermikides prefers to describe time feels in terms of rhythmic cents, 1/100th of a pulse unit. This enables you to use the same system for swing as you do for phrasing ahead of or behind the beat: if John Coltrane is playing straight time 10 cents behind the beat and Elvin Jones’ swing feel uses 60-cent-long onbeats, then Coltrane and Jones will line up on all the offbeats. This enables Coltrane to play with a different time feel from his rhythm section while still locking in with their swing.
One big difference between the way humans swing and the way computers do it is that humans don’t maintain a consistent swing ratio. Fernando Benadon found that not only do jazz musicians change their swing feel from one solo to the next, they vary it from one beat to the next. So when you say that Miles Davis tends to use a swing ratio of 1.2:1, that’s only vaguely approximating a whole universe of nuanced complexity. Benadon observes that jazz soloists swing more widely than bassists and drummers, and that they usually swing more widely at phrase endings. There is so much more microstructure waiting to be discovered through close study of jazz musicians’ timing. The concept of a swing ratio is a blunt analytical instrument at best, but at least it’s a place to start.
As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name.
The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation is mostly standard eighties rock, except for the horn section, which is one trumpeter and six (!) saxophonists. I learned from the Bowie Bible that Bowie wanted a backing vocalist who sounded “like a shopgirl”. Session guitarist Kevin Armstrong recommended his younger sister Janet, who had never sung professionally in a studio before. Knowing that makes me feel a little warmer toward her fairly awkward performance.
My older kid continues to be deep into Bowie, and has been learning “Ashes to Ashes” on piano. This tune has not been a favorite of mine historically; as a young person, I found it hard to connect to its carsick decadence. However, the kid adores it, so I’m giving it more of a chance. It’s certainly easier to relate to as a middle-aged guy with a lot of regrets. The song is surprisingly complicated and weird for a number one UK hit! Also, the music video was the most expensive ever made to that point:
The most distinctive aspect of “Ashes to Ashes” is right in its first second, that freaky piano sound. Producer Tony Visconti wanted a Wurlitzer, but there wasn’t one in the building, so as a substitute, he ran an acoustic piano through an Eventide Instant Flanger. The part is played by Roy Bittan from the E Street Band, who was recording The River with Bruce Springsteen in the studio next door at the Power Station. The fake strings are played by Chuck Hammer on a Roland GR-500 guitar synth. Carlos Alomar plays regular guitar, George Murray plays the funky slap bass, Dennis Davis plays the herky-jerky drum part, and Tony Visconti plays assorted hand percussion. Andy Clark added synth textures on a Minimoog and a Yamaha CS-80 later in the recording process.
Over the weekend I went with the family to see the newly remastered 1973 David Bowie concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The picture and sound quality are uneven at best, but Bowie is such a spellbinding performer that it doesn’t matter. One of the high points is his performance of this banger.
Like all the great Bowie songs of the era, this superficially sounds like a regular rock song, but it has a lot of peculiar songwriting and arrangement touches. Bowie plays acoustic guitar, but also saxophone and pennywhistle. Mick Ronson plays electric guitar and piano, and also wrote the string arrangement. Trevor Bolder plays bass and Woody Woodmansey plays drums.
In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.
I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.
