Help on the Way -> Slipknot! -> Franklin’s Tower

In this post, I talk through my favorite Grateful Dead prog epic, the three-song suite of “Help on the Way,” “Slipknot!” and “Franklin’s Tower.” The Dead wrote many of these epic suites, which usually consist of a few short through-composed sections that act as anchor points within long open-ended modal jams. “Help>Slip>Frank” is the most jazz-fusion-inspired of the suites, and the middle section is the most complex thing Jerry ever wrote. Tricky though it is, the ingredients are simple: arpeggiated minor seventh and diminished chords.

Here’s the studio version of the suite from Blues for Allah, annoyingly split into two tracks.

How metal is that album cover? My older stepbrother had a bunch of Dead LPs in our closet when I was growing up, and they radiated menace. I was very surprised when I finally worked up the nerve to listen to them, and discovered how affable and laid-back they were.

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Jazzy harmony and crazy tuplets in Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1

Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 in B-flat Minor is particularly hip.

All this metrical instability is easier to parse over a steady beat, so I made this remix:

I thought that a “nocturne” was supposed to evoke the night, or dreams or something, but no, it just means “a piece of music meant to be played at night,” like in a salon setting.

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What does the Well-Tempered Clavier sound like in actual well temperament?

First, some niche Twitter comedy:

The Well-Tempered Clavier is a book of JS Bach compositions for keyboard instruments in each of the twelve major and twelve minor keys. The name refers to Bach’s preferred tuning system, which made it possible to play (sort of) in tune in every key. This was a big deal, because in the usual tuning systems of Bach’s era, only some of the keys sounded good, while others sounded horrible. The history of tuning in Western music is complicated and abstruse, and I won’t go into detail about it in this post, but you can learn some of how it works here. The key facts:

  1. Western tuning systems, keys and scales are based on the natural harmonic series.
  2. Harmonics are based on prime numbers.
  3. Prime numbers don’t divide into each other evenly.

The practical consequence is that your music can either be in perfect tune, or it can use more than one key, but it can not do both. In Hindustani classical tradition, they opted for being in tune, so everything is in a single “key” defined by the omnipresent drone. Western Europeans wanted to be able to change keys, however, and that required some tuning compromises.

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Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata

Beethoven is famous for writing huge epic structures. But he could write memorable tunes, too, and the second movement of the “Pathétique Sonata” contains a particularly good one. It’s best to known to my age cohort from Schroder’s performance:

Here’s my Ableton Live visualization:

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Learn to improvise on the white piano keys

Improvisation is a core musical skill across a variety of styles and genres. Being able to make up music on the fly is obviously useful in and of itself, but improvisation is also an excellent tool for songwriting, composition, production, and teaching. The best way to learn how to improvise is to do it along with actual music. The problem is that so much actual music is harmonically complicated. What do you do if you have limited technique but aren’t content to run “Hot Cross Buns” over and over? To solve this problem, I’ve made a collection of tracks you can confidently improvise over using nothing but the white keys on the piano (the C major scale and its modes).

If you’re a pianist or keyboard player, you can improvise along with all the music in this post just by playing the white keys. If you’re a guitarist, consult any fingering chart for the C major scale–the default setting on Guitar Dashboard is a good one. You can also play along using your computer keyboard via the default setting on the aQWERTYon, or on the Ableton Push in its default scale mode. Trust your ears and have fun! Continue reading “Learn to improvise on the white piano keys”

Fugue as sample flip

Here’s a question from the always insightful Debbie Chachra:

Debbie’s intuition is correct, there is a connection between sample flipping and fugue writing. This connection supports a core argument of my dissertation research: hip-hop is a valuable area of study not only because it’s significant in and of itself, but also because it provides a set of methodologies you can use to understand other kinds of music as well. Let’s dig in!

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What does it mean to remix the classical canon

Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently.

https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697

I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.

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Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude

Let’s get the name out of the way first. Chopin didn’t title the piece “Raindrop,” nor did he give catchy nicknames to any of his other preludes. The names were given later by a fan named Hans von Bülow. Chopin’s actual title of this piece is “12 Préludes, Opus 28 Number 15 in D-Flat Major.” That’s not very memorable, though, so von Bülow’s name stuck.

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Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation

Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left hand plays in F-sharp major. “Hot Cross Buns,” this is not.

Mikrokosmos Number 133 is called “Syncopation,” and as the name suggests, it’s a study of complex rhythms. Here’s a recording of it by Bartók himself:

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