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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Bach Chaconne – Gimme the Lute mix

While investigating the Bach Chaconne, I found this beautiful lute performance by Hopkinson Smith.

It’s enlightening to compare Smith’s performance to Moran Wasser playing the Chaconne on 11-string guitar. The lute is less bright and resonant than guitar, but I like Smith’s playing better, he’s not as melodramatic. I couldn’t find any video of him playing lute, but you can see him playing a Renaissance guitar. Meanwhile, I did find a video of this gentleman explaining how the lute works.

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NYU Music Education Technology Practicum syllabus

This week I begin another iteration of my NYU class, a music technology crash course for future music teachers. Given the vastness of the subject matter and the constraints of a one-semester course, the challenge is always to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. I continue to take a project-based approach, where students produce an original track for each module. I don’t expect students to absorb all the details of the technical material around audio recording and such, I am mostly just giving them things to bookmark for future use. We do a recording studio project that isn’t listed here because it’s all hands-on during class time. If you want to use this syllabus for something, please do, and please let me know!


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Scales, keys and modes on the circle of fifths

If you want to understand Western music theory, the circle of fifths is an invaluable tool. For one thing, it can help you understand how key signatures work. But it also helps explain how the major scale and diatonic modes relate to each other, and gives a possible explanation for why they sound good.

Here’s the C major scale on the circle of fifths:

The purple notes are the ones that form “perfect” intervals above the root C: unison, octave, fourth and fifth. The green notes form major or “natural” intervals above the root. The numbers refer to the scale degrees.

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Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante

Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me.

Beautiful though this is, I’d like it even better if it grooved. So I brought the Barenboim recording into Ableton Live and put some beats under it, and now it really hits me where I live.

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Party like it’s 1624

In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, where it became a wildly popular dance. Over time, composers of “art” music got interested in it too, and they used it as the basis for an entire genre of increasingly abstracted compositions. By the time Bach wrote the chaconne in his Partita for Violin No. 2, he was referring to an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, something like a John Coltrane arrangement of a pop standard. It makes me wonder what a chaconne might have sounded like in its original context. Bach’s (and Coltrane’s) abstractions are wonderful in and of themselves, but you can’t fully appreciate them without understanding what they’re referring back to.

It’s easy to listen to Coltrane’s source material. If you try to do the same with for Bach, however, you have a harder time. When you do a Google search for chaconnes, you mostly find performances of Bach, or similarly abstracted works by other canonical composers. Thanks to Wikipedia, though, I did find a chaconne of the kind that a person might have actually danced to back in 17th century Spain. It’s a tune by Juan Arañés called “A La Vida Bona.” Here’s a performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band.

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Chord progressions in the Bach Chaconne

Recently I have been digging deep into the Bach Chaconne. Since I’m a poor music reader, I’ve been using Ableton Live to remix, loop, and analyze the piece, both in audio and MIDI form. It’s working! The structure of the Chaconne makes sense to me now when I hear it, and I’m learning to play sections of it (slowly and haltingly) on the guitar. I’m supposedly doing this because the piece is a useful teaching example for minor-key harmony. Really, though, I just enjoy listening to it and thinking about it, and I’m lucky enough to have a job where I can use some of that thinking later.

You’re supposed to analyze classical harmony by annotating the score with Roman numerals and figured bass. I come from jazz, though, and while we like Roman numerals in jazz, we don’t do figured bass. I did learn figured bass well enough to get through grad school, but I would rather write and think about modern chord symbols. Also, I’d much rather analyze by ear than on the page. So I went through the MIDI file of the Bach Chaconne and segmented it out whenever I heard a chord change. Then I labeled the chords, through a combination of looking at their constituent pitches and my subjective sense of the chords that those pitches imply.

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