My year in pop music theory teaching

See also: my year in pop aural skills teaching

This year I taught my first theory class in NYU’s new popular music sequence. It was not my first music theory class, or my first pop music class, but it was the first one in a university-level sequence dedicated specifically to pop. I think it mostly went great, and certainly the feedback from the students has been positive, but there are some rough edges remaining to smooth out.

Like the rest of the theory adjuncts in the department, I was given a syllabus to follow, but I had broad discretion in how I addressed each topic. Here’s the topic list: Continue reading “My year in pop music theory teaching”

In defense of “Wonderful Christmastime”

New on MusicRadar, I take a mostly sympathetic look at Paul McCartney’s omnipresent and divisive earworm. I don’t generally like Christmas music, but this song is so goofy and odd that I can’t help but find it endearing. The main problem with it is that the tempo is too fast and the feel is too square. I thought it would be fun to hear it with a better groove, specifically, the one from “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder.

This is the collaboration that I wish Paul and Stevie had done.

Jason Yust on the racist history of tonality

I haven’t done any culture war material lately, but Jason Yust recently published an article in the Journal of Music Theory with the title “Tonality and Racism“, and I couldn’t not respond. The arguments in the paper are relevant to my teaching life in NYU’s new and wonderful pop theory and aural skills sequence. These classes are vastly more inclusive and culturally relevant than the extremely white and Eurocentric classical theory sequence that I went through as an NYU grad student. However, we still have some work to do.

A perfect authentic cadence

In casual language, my NYU students use “music theory” to mean “Western European tonal theory and its accompanying notation and symbolic language.” So when they say “[Pop musician] doesn’t know music theory”, they mean, “[Pop musician] doesn’t read notation” or “[Pop musician] doesn’t know the conventions of tonal harmony.” If I push back, students will quickly self-correct and say that any abstract thinking about music counts as music theory, and that [Pop musician] certainly is thinking theoretically. But I’m concerned about this reflexive usage.

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Stormy Monday

Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented chords, tritone substitutions, and modal interchange at a nice slow tempo. I love when I can get this much juice out of a single tune.

First, here’s the T-Bone Walker original from 1947, with the unwieldy title “Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)“.

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A general theory of pop smashes

My latest MusicRadar column advances the theory that to be a truly generation-spanning pop colossus, a song has to be at least a little bit weird and annoying.

This was a tricky thing to write, because I wasn’t looking for “popular songs that I personally find annoying.” That would be easy, I find most popular songs to be annoying. But there’s a difference between a song being annoying because it’s boring, lazy and predictable, and a song being annoying because it’s weird and counterintuitive. That’s the good kind of annoying! 

Uncle John’s Band

The most common entry point for Grateful Dead listeners is the acoustic folkie material, especially “Uncle John’s Band”. That makes sense; the song is fun, memorable, and relatively accessible. It seems like it would make a good campfire singalong. But then you get in there to try to learn it, and the song turns out to be extremely odd. Like a lot of Dead tunes!

This excellent episode of the 500 Songs podcast tells how label executive Joe Smith was ecstatic when he heard UJB for the first time. He supposedly ran into the hallway and grabbed people, shouting “We’ve got a single! We’ve got a single!” UJB was the first Dead song that made it onto the Hot One Hundred, getting up to number sixty-nine. It sounds very little like “Touch of Grey“, the only Dead song to hit the top ten, but both songs share a kind of wry “what are you gonna do” attitude.

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Don’t Know Why

I needed a song with lots of secondary dominants in it for aural skills class, and I realized that Norah Jones’ adult-contemporary smash “Don’t Know Why” has a bunch of them. The song came out in 2002, though it could have been recorded at any time in the 50 years previous.

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ii-V-I

My NYU pop theory class is going from non-functional harmony to the most functional harmony there is, the ii-V-I cadence. It’s subdominant to dominant to tonic, Western tonal harmony the way God and Beethoven intended.

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The melodic-harmonic divorce in pop

This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It’s so common, in fact, that my students are having a hard time hearing it. This is not due to any lack of musicality among my students; it has to do with their listening expectations.

 

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Adding vocal harmony to a Tears for Fears song

My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song:

Here’s the acapella.

I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a good teaching example because it doesn’t have any. Also, the melody and chords are pretty simple without being boring.

Continue reading “Adding vocal harmony to a Tears for Fears song”