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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My year in blogging

Two big things happened in my academic life this year: I wrote a dissertation proposal (which is not quite done yet), and I developed and taught a music theory course at the New School. Both of these projects featured heavily on this blog. Here are some high points.

Kermit writes

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Teaching dynamics and loudness

When I cover dynamics and loudness in music theory class, I only spend a small part of the time talking about forte/piano, crescendo/diminuendo and so on. Once you have the Italian translations, those terms are self-explanatory. They are also frustratingly subjective, and they refer only to unamplified acoustic music. To understand dynamics in the present day, you need to understand decibels, perceptual loudness, and what “dynamics” mean in the era of recorded, amplified and electronic music.

First of all, let’s talk about the classical terms a bit. When you see that classical music uses “piano” to mean “quiet,” you might naturally wonder what the relationship is to the instrument. The piano’s inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori, originally called it “un cimbalo di cipresso di piano e forte,” meaning “a keyboard of cypress with soft and loud”. This got variously abbreviated as fortepiano, pianoforte, and finally, its current name. This was all in contrast to the piano’s predecessor, the harpsichord, which can only play at one volume.

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Remixing Ben Shapiro

My dissertation research includes a methodology of my own invention, which I’m calling analytical remixing. I’m writing about three hip-hop educators, in order to illuminate hip-hop as an education philosophy, not just a subject area. That includes centering the remix as an important and underexplored music education practice. Beyond just writing about remixing, I am making some remixes as part of my research product. Specifically, I’m taking audio data (interviews, music, and various cultural artifacts) and remixing them to create a dissertation mixtape.

The value of the remix method is so self-evident to me that I made little effort to justify or explain it in the first draft of my dissertation proposal. However, my advisor, Alex Ruthmann, rightly pointed out that it is not self-evident to people who aren’t me. He suggestied that I pick a specific example and walk through it. So in this post, that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a remix I made of Ben Shapiro explaining why rap isn’t music.

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How do key signatures work?

Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, the natural minor scale). This assumption makes an awkward fit with the music that the kids are making and listening to. Read on!

Several students have asked me if there is some shortcut or mnemonic for memorizing the key signatures. The answer is, yes, there are many, but I’ve never found them to be helpful. The only thing that worked for me was to learn, write and improvise a lot of music in every major and minor key until they were as familiar as the layout of my apartment. My method was slow, but effective.

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Live scoring with No Country for Old Men: update

This week in Fundamentals of Western Music class at the New School, we did an in-class improvisation exercise, where students created spur-of-the-moment scores to scenes from No Country for Old Men. I did this in response to being told by a faculty evaluator that I should have more music-making during class, a suggestion I strongly agree with. Students could choose between bringing their own instruments, playing synths from my computer, or using the piano in the classroom.

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