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!

Continue reading “Fugue as sample flip”

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.

Continue reading “What does it mean to remix the classical canon”

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.

Continue reading “Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude”

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:

Continue reading “Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation”

Two hundred Disquiet Junto submissions

Since January 2012, I have created over two hundred (!) pieces of music for the Disquiet Junto. That represents thirteen hours of recordings, which is more music than I have produced for every other creative undertaking in my life combined. In honor of this milestone, I’ve compiled my best submissions on Bandcamp.

Continue reading “Two hundred Disquiet Junto submissions”

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.

Continue reading “Eleanor Rigby”

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!”

Continue reading “Remixing a solo saxophone recording by Catherine Sikora”

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.

Continue reading “Perpetual motion in the Presto from Bach’s G minor Violin Sonata”