F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation

As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and sometimes call it a diminished fifth? What difference does it make if they sound the same?

I had a major “aha” moment when I learned about the history of Western tuning systems, and found out that F-sharp and G-flat were originally two different and non-interchangeable notes. I have enjoyed seeing that same “aha” look on my students’ faces when I explain it to them. But tuning systems are hard to understand, and my explanation still requires a lot of refining. This post is one in a series of iterations.

Continue reading “F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation”

What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool

What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In a previous post, I examined a phrase from the studio version of “The Music Never Stopped”. In this post, I look at the intro to “Eyes of the World” from 11/11/1973. 

I’m not going to talk about “Eyes of the World” as a song; I’ll save that for another post. Instead, I’m only concerned with Jerry’s solo in the first minute. Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”

New book chapter with Toni Blackman

Publication alert! I co-wrote a book chapter about hip-hop in the music classroom with Toni Blackman, one of my major music education heroes and the central figure in my doctoral dissertation. It’s called “Building Hip-Hop Music Educators: Personal Reflections on Rap Songwriting in the Classroom.” It’s part of a new edited volume about hip-hop education that is freely available as a PDF, as all scholarly publications ought to be.

Continue reading “New book chapter with Toni Blackman”

High Time

The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, Workingman’s Dead, and American Beauty.

Workingman’s Dead is easily the rootsiest Dead album. It’s named in homage to “Workin’ Man Blues” by Merle Haggard. (Bob Weir got his guitar part in “Cumberland Blues” from this song.) While the tunes on Workingman’s Dead are not overtly spacy, some of them are still plenty weird. “High Time” is the weirdest one.

Helen De Cruz says it best: “What is happening with these chords???” What indeed. We will get to that below.

Continue reading “High Time”

Hobo Blues

Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we can learn from them. I am especially interested in examples that don’t follow the standard twelve bar blues form or use the I, IV and V chords. Too many music education resources boil the blues down to these tropes, and I want students to understand that the music is more stylistically diverse than that. For example, listen to “Hobo Blues” by John Lee Hooker, which he first recorded in 1949.

This song sounds like the blues, but it doesn’t use the twelve bar form or the IV and V chords. Does it even have a form or chords at all? It’s more like an open-ended drone. Hooker learned this style of playing from his stepfather William Moore, who was from Louisiana where the blues sounded different from the predominant style of the Mississippi Delta.

Continue reading “Hobo Blues”

New MusicRadar column about Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”

This one was assigned by my editor, and I went into the song more or less cold. I ended up liking the song, though maybe that’s because so many of my students adore Chappell Roan and I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe she’s just good!

Anyway, as the column evolves, I am glad that it isn’t just about me and my whims. (You get plenty of that here on this blog.) Having an incentive to pay attention to this kind of song keeps me young.

Devil Got My Woman

The movie Ghost World tells us that people who are obsessed with old blues records are creeps, but also that old blues records are worth being obsessed with. There’s a pivotal scene where Enid, the young protagonist, hears “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, and reacts to it in much the same way that I do.

“There are no other records like that.” No, there really aren’t. Continue reading “Devil Got My Woman”

Russian Lullaby

When I was in college, I liked to dip into the dollar bin at the record store. That’s where I picked up Jerry Garcia’s second solo album. It was forgettable, even for an obsessive fan like me. Forgettable, that is, except for one song:

I had never heard of Django Reinhardt at that point, and I had no idea what I was hearing. All I knew was that I loved it. Jerry Garcia had his ups and downs as an artist, but he always had great taste in other people’s music.

Continue reading “Russian Lullaby”

The F-Flat Annual Back-to-School Symposium

Music ed folks! If you need some PD credit this summer, check out the online Annual Back-to-School Symposium presented by the good people at F-Flat Books. Heather Fortune and I are doing a session on groove and improvisation in ensemble classes. 

The lineup includes some of the people I admire most in the field: Brandi Waller-Pace, Shane Colquhoun, Steve Giddings, Kat Reinhert, and many others. Expect to learn a thing or two.

The minor key universe

In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale variants.

Continue reading “The minor key universe”