The racial politics of music education

In the face of ongoing protests against police brutality in the US, I’m seeing some music educators fretting about the relevance of their work. I believe that Eurocentric music education can validate and perpetuate white supremacy, and that our responsibility is to dismantle it. Here’s an excerpt of my dissertation in progress. I hope you find it useful or thought-provoking.

Ben Shapiro - rap isn't music

Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a form of critical theory that views social and political issues through the frame of race (Crenshaw, et al., 1996). CRT is premised on two central beliefs: that race is socially constructed, and that racism is deeply and broadly enmeshed within American society. “In research, the use of CRT methodology means that the researcher foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process; challenges the traditional research paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of people of color; and offers transformative solutions to racial, gender, and class subordination in our societal and institutional structures” (Creswell, 2007, p. 28). The story of American popular music is inextricable from its racial conflicts, and nowhere are these conflicts more acute than in hip-hop. Continue reading “The racial politics of music education”

Eleanor Rigby

In both music theory and music tech classes, I ask the students to pick songs and analyze their structure. This semester, one student chose “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. She had a hard time with it–understandably! It’s not a complicated song, but it is an unconventional one. In this post, I’ll talk through the tune’s many points of structural, music-theoretic and sonic interest.

Fun fact: “Eleanor Rigby” was issued as the B-side to the “Yellow Submarine” single in 1966. That’s a pretty brutal come-down in mood.

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Remixing a solo saxophone recording by Catherine Sikora

Many years ago, I played some jazz with Catherine Sikora. She was a fierce and excellent saxophonist then, and her playing has only grown in the time since. In the past few years, Catherine has been releasing a series of albums of solo and duo improvisation. That takes a lot of confidence! Her lines are abstract and angular, but they have their own strong internal logic, and she has effortless control over a range of tones and timbres.

When I hear “unaccompanied solo instrument recording,” my producer brain instantly says, “Remix!”

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Perpetual motion in the Presto from Bach’s G minor Violin Sonata

Struggling to comprehend Bach has been a reliable treatment for my quarantine blues. I’m guiding my listening with scholarly articles about his use of rhythm. Joseph Brumbeloe wrote a good one: “Patterns and Performance Choices in Selected Perpetual-Motion Movements by J. S. Bach.” By “perpetual motion,” Brumbeloe means unbroken streams of uniform note values. In another post, I talk about the Prelude from the Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major. This post deals with a similarly delightful and challenging piece, the Presto from the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor. Here’s a performance by Viktoria Mullova:

I also like this lute transcription by Hopkinson Smith.

If you’re going to write something with a continual “meedly meedly meedly” rhythm like this, the big challenge is how to create a sense of structure without the natural scaffolding of contrasting rhythmic values and rests. Joseph Brumbeloe says that you “must rely on the accents or stresses arising through metric placement, tessitura and the grouping which is suggested in more subtle ways by various tonal patterns.” In other words, since the rhythm is uniform and boring by design, you have to get very creative with patterns of pitch and contour. That is exactly what Bach does in the Presto.

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“Work Song” and blues harmony

It’s a cliché to say that jazz is European harmony plus African rhythm. For example, this lesson plan from Jazz in America says that jazz got its rhythm and “feel” from African music, and its harmony and instruments from European classical. This is not untrue, but it’s an oversimplification. A substantial amount of jazz harmony is African-derived too. Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” is a case in point. It’s one of the funkiest and most soulful jazz standards, inspired by the singing of chain gangs in Adderley’s native Florida.

The head is an archetypal example of the blues scale, and it is mostly played without chords. You need chords for the solos, though, so which ones should you use? Is the tune major, or minor, or modal, or what? There is no consensus in the jazz world. This is a surprise, given that “Work Song” is such a standard. In this post, I’ll talk through a couple of possible interpretations, before giving my preferred explanation (spoiler: it’s in blues tonality.)

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An intro to remixes

One of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music is the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new musical expression. The remix began as a way to make dance versions of pop songs, but it has evolved into an entire new art medium unto itself.

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Clair de Lune

I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural learning through remixing. First I tried putting the MIDI in Ableton over some beats. Then I thought it would sound better to use human performances and cooler beats.

This was my toughest remix challenge yet. Adapting breakbeats to triple meter is one thing; adapting them to 9/8 time is another. I did finally discover that “The Crunge” by Led Zeppelin is also in 9/8, and after some minor editing, the opening drum break fit in just fine. I also used jazz drumming sampled from McCoy Tyner and Adam Makowicz. I used aggressive low-pass filtering to keep the beats from overwhelming the delicate piano, and I beefed up the piano part via compression as well.

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Dear Prudence

John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was his best song. I agree. I have spent more time playing and remixing it than anything else in the Beatles catalog, and I continue to find new layers.

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Rhythmic ambiguity in the Bach E major partita prelude

I have been creating a series of beat-driven remixes of canonical classical works. I have mostly done this for my own enjoyment, because I like hearing the pieces with some groove to them. But I also sense that there might be pedagogical applications for this method as well. I finally found a good example: the rhythm in the bariolage passage from measures 17-28 of the prelude to Bach’s violin partita in E major. Listen to it at 0:24 in Viktoria Mullova’s recording, it’s the purple part:

Something strange happens whenever I listen to this passage: after the second measure, I start hearing the rhythm wrong. I bet you do too!

The passage is made of four-note groups. The lowest note in each group jumps out at you as being the most prominent one. They are in a different register from the others, and they define the harmony. You start hearing these standout notes as being accented, even if the performer isn’t accenting them. The convention in classical music is to put accented notes on strong beats. So you probably start hearing the lowest notes in each group as “downbeats,” and your sense of the meter reorients accordingly. But this is wrong! Each low note falls on the last sixteenth note of each grouping, not the first. You aren’t expecting such hip syncopation in 18th century music, so when the passage ends you get all confused about where the beat is.

Here’s the score, with the “accented” notes in red. If you are anything like me, you will quickly fall into a groove of hearing the red notes as downbeats beats, so the last note will feel strangely misplaced.

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Hip-hop glossary

This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to hip-hop slang and vocabulary. Such a thing would be impossible, especially because the culture is constantly producing new terms. This list will necessarily be out of date by the time you read it. My purpose is to introduce the most important musical terms, along with some more general slang for context.

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