I’ve been blessed that bothinstitutions where I teach music technology give me considerable freedom in how I do it. I find the music side to be quite a bit more interesting than the technology side, so I center my classes around creative music-making, and we address technical concepts as we encounter them. I’m learning that this approach is an unusual one, that music school is more about learning repertoire and technique and less about discovery and invention. I got some validation for my approach from The New Frontier: Secondary Project-Based General Music by Michael Hayden. His essay is basically proposing that all high school kids get to take my Music Tech 101 class.
How does cool music work? Rather than attempting the hard job of explaining how everything in cool music works, I will pick a usual song and talk you through it: “One Day My Son Of An Important Person Will Come” by Miles Davis, from the 1961 black round music thing by the same name.
First of all, here is the first time someone played the song, from Little Ice Pieces White.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0niwn2pOEno
Once you have the song in your head, listen to Miles Davis play it.
One of the great privileges of working at NYU is having access to the state-of-the-art Dolan Studio. Listening to music on top-end Lipinskis through an SSL console in a control room designed by Philippe Starck is the most exquisite audio experience I’ve ever had, and likely will ever have. Unfortunately, it’s also very far removed from the circumstances in which I listen to music in my normal life. It isn’t even an issue of the speakers or amps, though of course mine are nowhere near as good as the ones in Dolan. It’s more about the listening environment.
I hear it all the time from my friends in the rock world, and see it all the time in internet discussions: guitarists are struggling with their music theory, or they’ve given up on it completely. This is not their fault! Music theory is taught pretty badly for the most part, and it rarely addresses the music that rock musicians are playing.
Does this geometric relationship mean anything musically? Turns out that it does. Lydian and Locrian are mirror images in feeling, not just as necklaces. Read on!
I don’t know a lot about Afro-Caribbean rhythms, beyond the fact that they cause me intense joy whenever I hear them. My formal music education has focused almost exclusively on harmony, and I’ve had to learn about rhythm mostly on my own. That’s why it was so exciting for me to discover the work of Godfried Toussaint. He introduced me to a startlingly useful pedagogical tool: the rhythm necklace.
A rhythm necklace is a circular notation for rhythm. Let’s say your rhythm is in 12/8 time. That means that each cycle of the rhythm has twelve slots where sounds can go, and each slot is an eighth note long (which is not very long.) A 12/8 rhythm necklace is like a circular ice cube tray that holds twelve ice cubes.
What’s so great about writing rhythms this way? Rhythms are relationships between events that are non-adjacent in time. When you write your rhythms from left to right, as is conventional, it’s hard to make out the relationships. On the circle, the symmetries and patterns jump right out at you. I recommend the Toussaint-inspired Rhythm Necklace app to get these concepts under your fingers and into your ears.
You can’t look into Afro-Caribbean beats without coming across a bell pattern called Bembé, also known as “the standard pattern” or the “short bell pattern.” Here’s how it sounds:
I was probably first exposed to Bembé by Santana’s “Incident at Neshabur.”
Bembé’s meter is ambivalent. You can represent it as duple (4/4) or triple (6/8 or 12/8). Practitioners urge you not to think of the bell pattern as being in one meter or the other. Instead, you’re supposed to hold both of them in your head at the same time. The ambiguity is the point.
Earlier this spring, I subbed for Adam Bell‘s Music Technology 101 class at Montclair State. His sections were populated more exclusively with classical conservatory kids than mine, so for my one-shot lesson, I figured I’d talk them through some items from my illicit collection of multitrack stems, and give them a sense of the history of the recorded art form.
There’s a broad diversity of harmonic practices being used out there in the world of blues-based popular music, rock in particular. While a given song may not use a lot of scales and chords, the relationships between those scales and chords is rarely simple or obvious. You really just need to learn all of them. It takes a lot of practice. Fortunately, there is a single scale that works in every situation, which I’ll get to at the end of this post.
The app is delightful by itself, but it really gets to be miraculous when you use it as a wireless MIDI controller for Ableton. I was expecting to use this thing as a way to sequence drums. Instead, its real value turns out to be that it’s a way to perform melodies in real time. Continue reading “Rhythm Necklace”
