I was sad to learn about the recent death of Godfried Toussaint, whose work on the geometry of musical rhythm has been a major inspiration for me.
I never met Godfried, but I have read and re-read his work. His rhythm necklace diagrams were the direct inspiration for the Groove Pizza – I saw them and thought, I would love to have a drum programming interface like that.
I was looking for some new acapellas to remix, and was delighted to come across Whitney Houston’s vocal stem from “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” The 808-cowbell-laden production has undeniable charm, but the vocals by themselves are the real truth.
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.”
The most remarkable part of this arrangement comes between the third and fourth verses, when Collier modulates from the key of E to the key of G half-sharp. That’s the key which is halfway between G and G-sharp. Modulating there is a bananas thing to do!
Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) This was a tremendous gift for people who teach production, songwriting and the history of music technology. It was also a gift for people whose preferred method of expressing their fandom is through remixing. I fall into both categories.
A few years ago, when I was first teaching myself controllerism, I went through the multitracks of “A Day In The Life” and sampled a bunch of loops from each stem: drums, bass, piano, guitar, orchestra, and vocals. I’m writing a book chapter right now about Ableton Live and the Push controller, so to help focus my thoughts, I figured I would load all these loops into a new session and see what I could make happen. I decided to limit myself only to material from the song, in the spirit of The Reflex. Here’s the result:
I’ve been doing so much explaining basic music theory that I thought it would be fun to dig into something advanced: “Naima” by John Coltrane, from his all-killer-no-filler album Giant Steps.
There are as many interpretations of this tune’s chord changes as there are transcriptions of it. The ones in the Real Book are real wrong. I hear the chords in The New Real Book Volume II as sounding correct. Fortunately, there’s a surviving manuscript in Coltrane’s own hand, and it confirms the New Real Book version, with a few trivial differences.
Toni Blackman was a guest on the Clinical BOPulations podcast to talk about her song, “Why Worry,” and to discuss her freestyle rap practice in the context of music therapy. I did a remix of the song interspersed with Toni and her hosts’ discussion of it, enjoy:
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/toni-blackman-why-worry-clinical-bopulations-mix
The track represents Toni’s first foray into bedroom producing, and I hope it’s the first of many self-help bangers she creates that way.
In the fall of 2019, I started teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School’s Eugene Lang College. It combines the usual Music Theory I content with a broader, more ethnomusicological perspective that brings in various forms of pop, non-Western musics, and (most excitingly for me) the blues. It’s an existing course, but I have had wide latitude to remake it. The students need to know how notation works, what major and minor keys are, some basic chord progressions, some rhythms, and a few other musical parameters like loudness/dynamics. They need some exposure to the Western canon, to modernist and contemporary composers, and to some other sounds outside their usual listening habits. And, most importantly, they need to retain that information for future music courses and beyond.
If you read this blog, you know that I take a dim view of traditional music theory pedagogy, which tends to present the aesthetic preferences of Western European aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries as if they’re a universally valid and applicable rule system. I don’t mind the idea of teaching the classical canon, as long as I can approach it as an ethnic music of a particular time and place, not a transcendent or universal one. So it’s refreshing that the New School has such a broad and expansive view of how to teach theory.
I was been told to expect that about a third of the students will be coming in with extensive classical music training and prior study of music theory; a third will be self-taught pop musicians like me; and a third will have zero music experience of any kind. The challenge is to have assignments with low floors and high ceilings, so that half the class isn’t overwhelmed or bored at any given moment. I’m open to suggestions as I develop this further. Here’s the syllabus, which I have been updating regularly as I go: Continue reading “Developing an intro-level music theory course”
Fellow NYU doctoral student and possessor of fabulous blue hair Finn Upham hosts a podcast called So Strangely that interviews music science researchers. (The podcast is named for the sublimely weird speech-to-song illusion.) Finn recently interviewed Juliet Hess, who is fearlessly examining the whiteness of university-level music education, and invited me along for additional music education background. Listen by clicking the image:
As of this writing, the biggest song in America is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. It might also be the most interesting pop song of the 21st century so far.
“Old Town Road” defies genre categorization. Like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” it sits entangled in a vast musical rhizome. Lil Nas X calls it country-trap. It’s definitely not a rap song–Lil Nas X sings throughout, with a clear country twang. The beat sounds like hip-hop, but then, the beat of almost every slow or medium-tempo pop song sounds like hip-hop right now. The banjo suggests country, but as we’ll discuss below, that suggestion was unintended by the track’s producer. There’s a lot going on here! Before we take a look at its broader cultural significance, then, let’s take a close look at the musical details of “Old Town Road.”
Continue reading “Lil Nas X and the racial politics of country music”
I love Thelonious Monk more than just about any other musician in history. I enjoy learning and playing his tunes on the guitar, where they tend to sit well. I’m especially proud of my solo guitar arrangement of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” A jazz guitarist named Miles Okazaki, who is enormously better than me, also enjoys working out solo guitar arrangements of Monk. So much so, in fact, that he took it upon himself to record every single Monk tune for solo guitar. All seventy of them!
(Okazaki has also turned his obsessive-compulsive mind to a beautiful guitar book and an invaluable transcription and analysis of Charlie Christian’s solo on “Stompin’ at the Savoy.”)
As if the basic idea of this epic project wasn’t enough, Okazaki also imposed some constraints on himself: he played everything in its original key, and he didn’t use any overdubs or other digital trickery. There’s no question about how impressive this all is. However, “impressive” is not the same thing as “good.” Are Okazaki’s recordings good?
