This summer, I’m teaching Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock at Montclair State University. It’s my first time teaching it, and it’s also the first time anyone has taught it completely online. The course is cross-listed under music and African-American studies. Here’s a draft of my syllabus, omitting details of the grading and such. I welcome your questions, comments and criticism.
Continue reading “Prepping my rap and rock class at Montclair State”
If I’m going to understand progressive philosophies of education, then I need to understand John Dewey. So here we go.
Dewey is a progressive hero. He was a supporter of women’s suffrage, a founding member of the NAACP, and was ahead of his time on the importance of multiculturalism. Contrary to what I had always assumed, he did not invent the Dewey Decimal System. Given that I’m reading about him in the context of music education, it was amusing to learn that he had congenital amusia. Finally, a fun autobiographical fact: I attended a very fancy school modeled on Dewey’s Laboratory School at the University of Chicago.
Before we get to Dewey’s thoughts on art and education, here are some of his key political stances, as explained by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Classical liberals think of the individual as an independent entity in competition with other individuals. Social and political life are the arena in which individuals engage in the competitive pursuit of self-interest, preferably with minimal interference from the government. Dewey preferred to think of individuals as parts of a bigger organism, dependent on our relationships with each other for our survival and well-being. In Dewey’s model, freedom isn’t just the absence of constraints, but rather the positive fact of participation in an ethical social order.
Continue reading “John Dewey on music education as experience”
My youngest private music production student is a kid named Ilan. He makes moody trip-hop and deep house using Ableton Live. For our session today, Ilan came in with a downtempo, jazzy hip-hop instrumental. I helped him refine and polish it, and then we talked about his ideas for what kind of vocal might work on top. He wanted an emcee to flow over it, so I gave him my folder of hip-hop acapellas I’ve collected. The first one he tried was “Fu-Gee-La [Refugee Camp Remix]” by the Fugees.
https://youtu.be/pwx_fKIgizk?t=22m53s
I had it all warped out already, so all he had to do was drag and drop it into his session and press play. It sounded great, so he ran with it. Here’s what he ended up with:
https://soundcloud.com/ilpom/the-fugees-fu-gee-la-lilpom-interpretation
I’m continuing my public-facing note taking on PhD prep reading with my great-grandmentor, Liora Bresler, and her book Beyond Methods: Lessons from the Arts to Qualitative Research. She and her co-authors ask: How in the heck are you supposed to evaluate music education? Or any kind of arts education? Or anything having to do with the arts at all?
Bresler et al propose that we look to ethnography in general and ethnomusicology in particular, and learn from their best practices. Furthermore, we can use music itself as a research methodology for music education. I’ve been using music creation and remixing as a tool for doing education for a while now, but using music as a research methodology for education is a new and exciting idea for me.
Continue reading “Liora Bresler on qualitative research methodology”
With this post, I begin some public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. The goal here is to explain the book to myself, but if this is helpful to you in some way, good.
What is the point of music education? For Elliott and Silverman, the goal is to develop each student as a person. Music engages and emerges from every aspect of your personhood, and so does music education. To talk about music education, then, you first have to define what a person is.
We created the Groove Pizza to make it easier to both see and hear rhythms. The next step is to create learning experiences around it. In this post, I’ll use the Pizza to explain the structure of some quintessential funk and hip-hop beats. You can click each one in the Groove Pizza, where you can customize or alter it as you see fit. I’ve also included Noteflight transcriptions of the beats.
This simple pattern is the basis of just about all rock and roll: kicks on beats one and three (north and south), and snares on beats two and four (east and west.) It’s boring, but it’s a solid foundation that you can build more musical-sounding grooves on top of.
This Billy Squier classic is on WhoSampled’s list of most-sampled breakbeats for good reason. There are only two embellishments to the backbeat cross: the snare drum hit to the east is anticipated by a kick a sixteenth note (one slice) earlier, and the kick drum to the south is anticipated by a kick an eighth note (two slices) earlier. It isn’t much, but together with some light swing, it’s enough to make for a compelling rhythm. The groove is interestingly close to being symmetrical on the right side of the circle, and there’s an antisymmetry with the kick-free left side. That balance between symmetry and asymmetry is what makes for satisfying music. Continue reading “Seeing classic beats with the Groove Pizza”
I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a beginner-level class using any DAW–my beginners use GarageBand. The last two projects are more advanced and require a DAW with sophisticated editing tools and effects, like Ableton Live. If you’re a teacher, feel free to use these (and let me know if you do). Same goes for all you bedroom producers and self-teachers.
The projects are agnostic as to musical content, style or genre. However, the computer is best suited to making electronic music, and most of these projects work best in the pop/hip-hop/techno sphere. Experimental, ambient or film music approaches also work well. Many of them draw on the Disquiet Junto. Enjoy.
I’m currently working with the Ed Sullivan Fellows program, an initiative of the NYU MusEDLab where we mentor up and coming rappers and producers. Many of them are working with beats they got from YouTube or SoundCloud. That’s fine for working out ideas, but to get to the next level, the Fellows need to be making their own beats. Partially this is for intellectual property reasons, and partially it’s because the quality of mp3s you get from YouTube is not so good. Here’s a collection of resources and ideas I collected for them, and that you might find useful too.
The Groove Pizza is a playful tool for creating grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles, and patterns. Here’s a beat I made just now. Try it yourself!
We’re putting together the segment of Theory For Producers that deals with the minor modes. We needed an iconic example of natural minor, and we ideally wanted it to be by a woman. After many rejected alternatives, we settled on one of the high water marks of contemporary R&B, “Family Affair” by Mary J Blige.
I didn’t know until I looked it up just now that this was produced by Dr Dre. I’m not surprised, though, because it’s such a banger. Here’s my transcription of the string riff:
