Thelonious Monk wrote a lot of excellent blues tunes. “Straight, No Chaser” is the weirdest and coolest one. Here’s his first recording of it, from 1951:
Here’s another good one, from his 1967 record of the same name:
I’m doing a session for the 2021 Remixing General Music conference
You should come! It’s on Zoom. Follow some live tweeting here.
I’m going to talk about drum programming with the Groove Pizza as part of a broader philosophy of centering groove in music ed. Online conferences are good, I hope we keep doing them after the pandemic is over.
Circular chord charts
Being home with my kids all day is not very conducive to dissertation writing, but my fragmented attention is still up to the task of making infographics. I’ve been thinking about ways of visually representing grooves. Since circles work so well for rhythms, maybe they can work for harmonies too. Here’s a circular view of twelve bar blues in C:
Think of this as a chord chart wrapped in a circle rather than written in a line. Each cell is a measure. Start on the C7 at the top and move clockwise.
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 cell that repeats indefinitely. A song is a hierarchical organization of smaller cells that form a linear sequence with a beginning, middle and end. The lack of large-scale structure in a groove makes it effortlessly malleable and extensible. Want to make it thirty seconds longer? No problem. Want to make it thirty minutes longer? No problem. Songs are not so flexible. If you wanted to make “Yesterday” longer, would you… make up more verses? Repeat the bridge again?
Beethoven Remixed
The BBC is doing a Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony remix contest. You have to be a UK resident to enter, but anyone can download the samples and stems. They are pretty interesting! The producers recorded the orchestra’s instrument groups in isolation to create the stems, and they apparently tempo-mapped the whole thing to 108 BPM so it all falls neatly on the grid. For some reason, however, the web site doesn’t tell you about the tempo thing anywhere; you have to figure that out for yourself.
The web site also doesn’t say anything about the copyright status of the samples. I would assume you aren’t supposed to do anything with them outside of contest submissions, but that’s based on nothing except common sense. Common sense also tells me that once a sample set has been released into the wild, who knows where it might end up?
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 the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”
Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases.
So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording:
Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky. This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of.
Für Elise
Like most piano students at his level, my kid is now learning Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor for solo piano, better known to the world as “Für Elise.” Or more accurately, he’s learning part of it. There turn out to be more sections than the iconic minor-key hook we’re all familiar with. These sections are weirdly disjointed from the main hook.
When I pointed out on Twitter how strange it is that there are all these other parts, a former student responded:
from my understanding beethoven wrote fur elise for a girl he liked who sucked at piano which is why the famous part is so accessible but she fell for someone else which is why the less famous parts are so difficult
— your fave 🖤✨ (@punksonata) November 14, 2020
That’s pretty funny. It’s not clear exactly who Elise was, but a likely candidate was a student of Beethoven’s. She was eighteen when he was forty, which, gross.
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye
This one’s for you, Donald Trump.
Lonely Woman but it’s Gregorian chant
This morning I saw this tweet:
Lonely Woman but it's Gregorian chant
— wayne&wax (@wayneandwax) October 30, 2020
I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I dragged them onto other tracks.
Transcribing Kendrick Lamar
There is a lot going on in “DUCKWORTH”, between the story, the samples, and the production. I’m just focused on Kendrick’s flow for now, but there is a mountain of musicological study to be done with the other aspects of the song, and how the song relates to the rest of the album.