Syncopation in Chopin

I’m trying to get better at understanding classical music, ideally without doing too much Schenkerian analysis. I can hunt for cadences as well as anyone who’s been to music school, and I understand how important they are as structural elements in the Western canon. But there’s more to this music than harmony. It has rhythm too, and I’m curious to know who’s studying that aspect. While digging through Google Scholar results, I found John Rink’s rhythmic analysis of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 No 3. This is the one where Chopin starts with one of his loveliest, most achingly wistful melodies, and then inexplicably launches into Cloud Cuckooland. Here’s a recording by Maurizio Pollini.

I was unsurprised to learn from Wikipedia that the main melody has been repurposed for many pop songs over the past 150 years, though they tend not to use the crazy part. An example:

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The Amen Break of snobbery

Garrett Schumann posted on Twitter about Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E major, Op 11 No 5, one of the great one-hit wonders of the Western canon.

I didn’t recognize the title and composer, but the music itself was instantly familiar to me as a film score cliche signifying classiness. When I posted that observation, Christopher Hunter responded.

That phrase is so precisely correct.

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Let’s argue about this one weird chord in the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor

I have some aspirations in music theory pedagogy, and toward that end, I’m learning more about Schenkerian analysis. If I’m going to resist it, I should at least be conversant in the thing I’m resisting, right? So I’ve been reading Schenkerian Analysis: Perspectives on Phrase Rhythm, Motive and Form by David Beach. One of his examples is the opening nine bars of the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Op. 117: No. 2. Listen here:

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Flava In Ya Ear

It is my duty as a hipster dad to introduce my kids to all the classics of 90s rap, and they have been especially taken with this one.

We’ve been enjoying making up our own lyrics to the hook. First we kicked flava in ya nose, then ya mouth, then ya eye. From there we moved onto kicking all kinds of things into all kinds of places. My four year old daughter especially enjoys kicking boogers in ya face. It’s a truly versatile phrase.

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What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?

Asaf Peres recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in “Let Me Love You” by Ariana Grande.

When I went to listen to the song, I immediately heard all kinds of weird things in the rhythm: that the chords were falling on weak beats, that the downbeat was displaced, that the drum pattern was misaligned somehow. I wasn’t alone in hearing these things. Asaf was puzzled, since he was confident in his hearing. Finally, I put the tune into Ableton and carefully transcribed it. I was totally wrong! But in fairness to me, the song is a rhythmically unconventional one, especially its opening few bars. Continue reading “What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?”

Glenn Gould wanted me to make this remix

Glenn Gould thought people should make their own edits of classical recordings.

He explains this idea in greater depth here. I read it and thought, challenge accepted!

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Goodbye Ralph

My stepfather, Dr Ralph Dell, died peacefully last night at home, in his sleep. He was in the end stage of dementia, and this was a long time coming. Family was around him, we were listening to Paul Simon’s Graceland, and then he just drifted off. It was as good an ending as we could have hoped for.

Ralph had a long and extraordinary life. He was born in a remote Alaskan village; he was one of the youngest full professors in the history of Columbia University’s medical school; he built beautiful custom cabinets using Japanese joinery (no nails!), he programmed computers with punch cards in the 1950s; he was a co-holder of the patent on the electrolyte solution they gave my son in the NICU; the list goes on. He loved nature, science fiction, and the blues. We already miss him.

Here’s Ralph’s official obituary.

Classical music as ancient alien power source

Classical music is both familiar and strange to me. My parents played classical radio constantly when I was growing up, and I have primal memories of Robert J Lurtsema intoning “This… is Morning… Pro Musica… on National… Public… Radio.” My dad in particular was a huge opera buff, with a floor-to-ceiling collection of tapes and CDs. When I got to grad school, I was able to place out of the music history requirement just by having picked up so much of it by osmosis.

On the other hand, I don’t ever remember feeling like the music was “mine.” It sounded remote and arcane, a maze of formalities in languages I didn’t understand. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes (often) I didn’t, but mostly it just washed over me.

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Ignorant Populists

Build A Fort is the drums/saxophone duo of  Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir, two of the leading lights in progressive music education. The title of their new album, Ignorant Populists, is presumably a play on their role in advancing popular music pedagogy. The album was mostly recorded while Gareth was in New York and Zack was in Edinburgh, but that is no big obstacle in the age of the internet.

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Teaching note values

Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this post will assume that we’re in 4/4 time, because it’s the default rhythmic setting for Western music, and all note values are determined in reference to it. Also, 4/4 is the time signature of most of the music that you probably like.

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