The best way to teach the diatonic modes is to compare them to each other in parallel. One way to do that is to just run up and down them scalewise, but that isn’t very musically satisfying. So I thought, how about putting a familiar melody into all the modes? I wanted one that touches every note in the diatonic scale, and that fits within one octave. “Joy To The World” fit the bill perfectly.
Understanding intervals
There are two ways to understand intervals: the right way, and the way I learned them. Before we get into that, let me point you to some good resources for learning the right way. I like the online tutorials by Robert Hutchinson, Chelsey Hamm and Bryn Hughes, musictheory.net and musicca.com. I really love Nate May’s visual approach. And if you like learning from videos (which I don’t), this one by Saher Galt is good. I find it most helpful to visualize the intervallic structure of the diatonic scale on a circle, and if you like to think that way too, try the aQWERTYon.
What is voice leading?
Sit down at the piano and play the chords C and F in root position, back and forth, like so: (C E G) to (F A C). Pretty clunky! Now invert the C chord; that is, move the bottom note up an octave. Alternate that version of the C chord with the F chord, like so: (E G C) to (F A C). It sounds smoother! You just experienced the magic of voice leading.
To understand how voice leading works, imagine that each note in a chord is being sung by a different person. For three-note chords, you will need three people. Let’s call them David Crosby, Steven Stills and Graham Nash. (In the photo, they’re sitting Nash, Stills, Crosby.)
Visualizing note and rest durations
Kids need to learn how to read staff notation. However, they would rather look at the MIDI piano roll. My question is, why not show them both? Each view has its own affordances. Staff notation is more human-readable and space-efficient, but the piano roll is more discoverable for beginners. The staff doesn’t show microrhythmic subtleties, but it isn’t supposed to; the performer adds those.
Here are some note durations in both views:
What is tempo?
The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live.
The song’s tempo ranges between 70 and 90 beats per minute over the course of the tune, with noticeable speeding up at the end.
What is syncopation?
(Meta-level note: I rewrite this explainer every few years and now that I have a couple of new music theory gigs, I am rewriting it yet again.)
Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony: conflict, surprise, defiance of expectation. If you place your rhythmic accents where listeners expect them, then the music gets boring fast. If you place them where listeners don’t expect them, that’s where the fun starts.
To understand syncopation, you need to understand the concept of strong and weak beats (and subdivisions of beats). The strong beats (and subdivisions) are where you expect accents and other important musical events to fall. If you accent weaker beats (or subdivisions), syncopation is the result. The weaker the beats that you are accenting, the more intense the syncopation.
The major key universe
Minor keys are complicated, because there are so many different minor scales. Major keys seem simpler, because there is only the one major scale. At least, that is how things worked in Western Europe between 1700 and 1900. In present-day Anglo-American pop, though, we need to expand our idea of what a major key is.
New MusicRadar column on Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”
I had fun with this one. I love Tom Breihan’s Stereogum column The Number Ones, in which he is reviewing every number one Billboard hit in chronological order. His best columns are often about the most insubstantial or annoying songs, because then he can apply a cool objectivity to the processes of the pop machine.
“Espresso” is insubstantial, and while I enjoy it just fine, I understand why it irritates my fellow dads. But I am a poptimist and I start from the assumption that if a lot of people like something, there must be a reason. There is plenty to enjoy in a song like “Espresso” and it’s worth examining it to find out how it works.
The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me
The top number in a time signature is easy to understand. Is the song in four? Count “one, two, three, four.” Is it in three? Count “one, two, three.” Is it in five? Count “one, two, three, four, five.” That’s all there is to it. However, the bottom number is another story. What is going on down there? I collected various examples of time signatures in this track I made, but I didn’t understand why “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel is in 7/4 but “One More Night” by Can is in 7/8.
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Happiness is a Warm Gun
The White Album is full of cobwebby subterranean corners, and this song is one of the cobwebbiest. The title comes from an issue of American Rifleman that John Lennon thought was funny in a bleak way. The joke became quite a bit more bleak after his death.
You can listen to the isolated tracks here. This is probably the most formally complex Beatles song unless you count the Abbey Road medley as a single work of music. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is a miniature medley unto itself, since John stitched it together from several unfinished fragments. It took a lot of in-studio rehearsal to pull it together, and the band needed more than seventy takes (including false starts) to get the final one. It’s interesting to compare this earlier take, which doesn’t have all the overdubs.
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