In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around its implications. George Clinton’s playfulness can easily mislead you into thinking he’s a clown, but he is really more like a prophet.
For proper context, check out this live version of “Mothership Connection” from Halloween 1976–start at 37:25. It’s almost twice as long as the studio version, even though the tempo is faster. The lead vocalist is the incredible Glenn Goins, who died of cancer just two years after this was filmed.
In fifth grade, my class studied the Middle Ages, which my fantasy-nerd self adored. I have a memory from that time of playing “Greensleeves” on the recorder. This memory is probably not accurate, though, because “Greensleeves” was much too hard for me to play. There are some tricky non-diatonic notes, and the two halves of the tune are connected by a leap of a minor seventh. On the other hand, those same features make it an ongoing object of fascination for me as an adult musician. Before we dig into the harmony, first let’s clear up some of the mythology. Sorry to be a buzzkill, but no, Henry VIII didn’t write the song, and, no, Lady Greensleeves was not a prostitute.
Here’s a plausible-sounding period rendition of the tune, with some anachronistic anime graphics.
Like any centuries-old folk song, there is no single definitive version of “Greensleeves.” Instead, there are endless variants, all of which emerge from an undocumented aural tradition. (From Ian Pittaway’s invaluable blog, I learned that there was a 17th century version called “Greene Sleues and Countenaunce in Countenaunce is Greene Sleues.” That wins.) Most variants of the tune use broadly the same melody, but with one key difference: sometimes they use the boring scale, and sometimes they use the cool scale. I explain what I mean by that below.
Music theory is hard. Its naming conventions make it harder. Scale names are especially confusing. For example, the diatonic modes are named after places in and around ancient Greece. I’m sure that Aristoxenes found these names memorable and meaningful in 300 BC, and maybe medieval European theorists felt that way too, but now they are no help at all. The names “harmonic minor” and “melodic minor” are a little better, because they at least try to describe the scales’ respective functions. But those functions only apply in historical music. It’s routine in current music to make melodies from harmonic minor and harmonies from melodic minor. You can see why people hate music theory.
So, here’s my proposal: let’s rename the scales so that their names give you a better idea of their function and/or cultural context, and to advance the larger goal of decolonizing music theory.
For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits the shelves, but the hard part is over.
The book is for music educators who want to develop classes in music technology, production, beatmaking, songwriting, or film scoring. It includes a full curriculum’s worth of project plans that Will created for his wildly successful music tech program at Lebanon High School in Ohio. We also talk about methods for developing your own projects, keeping your material current, purchasing and maintaining gear, budgeting and fundraising, selling the idea to your school, teaching music tech online, and the radically progressive educational philosophy animating our work. I’ll keep you posted about the release date.
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.
If you came here hoping to learn the suite on guitar, Craig Acree’s meticulous transcription of “Slipknot!” is by far the best one out there. I interpret the time signature changes a bit differently than Craig does, but I can vouch for his accuracy.
Here’s a good guitar tutorial for “Help on the Way.”
Before we get into the analysis, here’s some enjoyable Dead lore for you.
In the 1980s, the band simplified the twisty parts of “Slipknot!”. I grew up with the version from Without a Net. It has its MIDI-enhanced charms, but I like the original version better. Dead & Company play the 80s version, but slower, tighter, and with better singing. (John Mayer’s outfit in that video is an incredible eyesore.)
I consider the Blues for Allah version to be canonical, but for in-depth analysis, I’m going to use the version on One From The Vault instead. It’s structurally identical to the album version, but it comes as a more convenient single track. The only difference between them is that on Blues for Allah, “Franklin’s Tower” fades out at the end, while on One From The Vault they end it by repeating its intro. Let’s dig in!
“Help on the Way”
The whole tune is in F Dorian mode. After an eight bar intro on Fm, there are three musically identical verses, along with a guitar solo that also uses the verse form. The form has four phrases.
The first phrase moves from Fm7 to Cm7 to Fm7. It ends with a bass walk down the F Dorian scale from 8^ to 7^ to 6^ (F to E-flat to D) in a groovy tresillo rhythm. I guess you could also consider that last chord to be a Dø7 or Bb7/D, it’s all the same thing.
The second phrase is the same as the first, but it ends with Fm7/Cm7/Fm7 on the tresillo rhythm.
The third phrase is on Bb7, moving to Cm7, and ending on a very hip Bb13sus4 chord. You could also think of it as Abmaj7 with B-flat in the bass. This phrase is an extra measure long, which gives the otherwise predictable form a subtle asymmetry.
I don’t know why there’s an exclamation point in the title. Maybe it’s because this is where the real fun begins. I describe the various sections of this tune as follows: Transition 1, Maze 1, Plateau 1, the long jam section, Plateau 2, Maze 2, and Transition 2. You’ll notice that the sections form an imperfect palindrome. Pretty cool.
Maze 1 ends with a sequence of four-note arpeggios: an ascending E minor arpeggio, 1^-3^-5^-1^, then seven descending minor seventh chords, 7^-5^-3^-1^, on Bm7, F#m7, Am7, Em7, Bm7 again, Am7 again, and Em7 again. This sequence lands on a bar of Am7.
Now we’re on Plateau 2. Unlike Plateau 1, this stays in 4/4 throughout. The guitars and keyboards do a call and response with the rhythm section. (Phil’s bass playing on the studio version of this passage is the funkiest eight bars of his entire bass playing career.)
Now we come to Transition 2. The mode changes to (mostly) A Mixolydian, where it will stay for the rest of the suite. There are four repeats of a nicely syncopated country-sounding riff on A, C and Em.
“Franklin’s Tower”
Finally, we can relax our minds: from here on out, it’s a simple two-bar loop in A Mixolydian mode, A to G to D to G, times infinity. The only mild complexity is the harmonic rhythm: the G chords are displaced half a beat later than you’re expecting. Jerry loved stretching out on a syncopated Mixolydian groove.
I have enjoyed this suite for thirty years now and have been curious about learning to play it for most of that time, but until recently, I would never have bothered. I could have transcribed it all into notation, but that would have been so labor-intensive as to not be worth the time. (No one is clamoring for my solo guitar arrangement of any Grateful Dead song.) But this was quick work in Ableton Live, because I could just line up the recording with the grid and annotate the audio itself, rather than having to flip back and forth between the recording and the score. This program is such a gift to aural learners like me.
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.
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:
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:
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).
