Living for the City

This Stevie Wonder classic is an iconic blues-based groove combined with some very non-blues-based harmony.

Stevie sang all the parts and played all the instruments, including the sumptuous analog synth sounds designed with Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Stevie’s brother Calvin Hardaway is the main character in the spoken interlude. Ira Tucker Jr of the Dixie Hummingbirds is the drug dealer, Stevie’s lawyer plays the judge, and a studio janitor is the corrections officer. 

Here’s a live version:

There’s plenty of commentary out there about the lyrics. This essay by Rowan Ricardo Phillips is an especially good read on the line “New York, just like I pictured it, skyscrapers and everything.” But there isn’t much out there about the music.

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The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram:

It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths:

In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from and what they mean.

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Remixing David Bowie’s “Starman”

In Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity, we include a series of project plans that are designed to scaffold student creativity. If you sit someone down in front of an empty DAW session and tell them to be creative, they are likely to be paralyzed by uncertainty or anxiety. It works better to give them a starting point, some constraints, some raw material. In the Simple Remix project, you give students an acapella track (an unaccompanied vocal) and have them create new instrumental backings for it. One of my favorite songs for this purpose is David Bowie’s 1972 classic “Starman.”

This is one of many Bowie acapellas in wide circulation.

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Morning Dew

Do you ever think about how there are several thousand nuclear missiles sitting in silos around the world, ready to launch at a moment’s notice? When I was a kid in the 1980s, that was the main macro-level anxiety lurking behind day-to-day life. Now we worry about different things: the climate, the pandemic, the impending collapse of American democracy. But those missiles are all still there! The Grateful Dead ended a lot of their sets with a tune about what it would be like the day after the missiles launched. That is not the expected way to close out a set of hedonistic hippie rock.

This t-shirt is funny, but the song itself is pretty extraordinarily horrifying. In a good way!

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The harmonic family tree

My blog stats have made it crystal clear that very few of you want to read about tuning systems. However, a vocal minority of you do love reading about them, and I definitely enjoy writing about them. So, let’s dig in and see how much Western harmony we can derive from the natural overtone series!

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Seventh chords in just intonation vs 12-TET

I enjoy listening to Jacob Collier explain his music more than I enjoy the music itself. His arrangement of “Moon River” is mostly exhausting. However, Miles Comiskey pointed me to an interesting moment in this explainer video at the 1:04:22 mark where Jacob talks about how Kontakt enables you to change your instrument tuning on the fly.

Jacob takes a dominant seventh chord and plays it in two different tuning systems: twelve-tone equal temperament, the system we’re all used to, and just intonation, which is a more “pure” harmonics-based system. The chord sounds very different in the two systems. That is a profound musical concept that is not easy to understand! Jacob buries it in his song under five thousand other ideas, but I thought it would be helpful if I built a whole track around it:

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Let’s analyze Alexander Scriabin incorrectly

I get academic articles in my email from various lists that I’m on, and this was an interesting one: “The Pedagogy of Early, Twentieth-Century Music: Ideas for a Classroom Discussion based on a Multi-Faceted Analysis of Scriabin’s Op. 31, No. 4.” by Michael Chikinda. Here’s the piece he’s talking about:

I don’t know Scriabin’s music very well, and I liked this immediately, so I wanted to know more. Journey on with me!

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Dual tonicity in a classic klezmer tune

I’m rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm and very much enjoying the work of music supervisor Steven Rasch. In season five, episode eight, Larry pretends to be an Orthodox Jew to win over the head of the Kidney Consortium. To soundtrack the scene where Larry first meets the guy, Rasch chose a classic klezmer tune, “Tanz Tanz Yidelekh”, which is Yiddish for “Dance dance Jews.” Yes, that is the title.

I played this tune with F Train Klezmer back in the day and it’s a beauty. It’s also quite a music theory puzzle! Continue reading “Dual tonicity in a classic klezmer tune”

Led Zeppelin, “Ten Years Gone”

I like to dip into Rick Beato’s YouTube channel once in a while. He’s too Boomer-ish and curmudgeonly about current pop music for my tastes, but when he rhapsodizes about the 70s rock that he loves, he’s delightful. His list of the top 10 Led Zeppelin riffs is especially pure Beato essence.

Number six on Rick’s list is “Ten Years Gone”, a power ballad from Physical Graffiti and a bit of a deep cut. After this video reminded me that it existed, I went and listened to the song with fresh ears, and I very much enjoyed it. Continue reading “Led Zeppelin, “Ten Years Gone””