Pop songwriting in the age of the Digital Audio Workstation

Bennett, J. (2011). Collaborative songwriting – the ontology of negotiated creativity in popular music studio practice. Journal on the Art of Record Production, (5), online.

My professional life at the moment mostly consists of teaching classical and jazz musicians how to write pop songs. While every American is intuitively familiar with the norms of pop music, few of us think about them explicitly, even trained musicians. It’s worth considering them, though. While individual pop songs might be musically uninteresting, in the aggregate they’re a rich source of information about the way our culture evolves. Joe Bennett describes popular song as an “unsubsidized populist art form,” like Hollywood movies and video games. The marketplace exerts strong Darwinian pressures on songwriters and producers, polishing pop conventions like pebbles being tumbled in a river.

Tin Pan Alley

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The poetics of rock

I’m teaching at Montclair State University because of Adam Bell, a fellow self-taught rock and pop musician turned academic. Adam loves to quote The Poetics of Rock by Albin Zak, and rightly so.

Albin Zak - The Poetics of Rock

Zak’s major point is that rock is an art form about making records, and that the creativity in making records is only partially in the songs and the performances. A major part of the art form is the creation of sound itself. It’s the timbre and space that makes the best recordings come alive as much as any of the “musical” components. We need some better language to describe the different components that go into making a rock record, or any kind of recording.

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Mixing “Call Me Maybe”

Sound On Sound magazine ran this highly detailed account of mixing the inescapable summer jam of 2012. It’s the most thorough explanation of a contemporary pop song’s mix process that I’ve ever read.

The specifics of the gear and the plugins are interesting, but the main takeaway is just how complex and nuanced the soundscape of pop music can be. “Real musicians” tend to dismiss this kind of song for its melodic and harmonic simplicity, but the real creativity is in the sound itself, the details of the vocals and synths and drums. “Call Me Maybe” leaps out of the speakers at you, demanding your attention, managing both to pound you with sonic force and intrigue you with quiet detail. Whether you want your attention grabbed in this way is a matter of taste. I happen to love the song, but even if it isn’t your cup of tea, the craft behind it bears some thinking about.

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First day of music tech class

I recently began my second semester of teaching Music Technology 101 at Montclair State University. In a perfect world, I’d follow Mike Medvinsky’s lead and dive straight into creative music-making on day one. However, there are logistical reasons to save that for day two. Instead, I started the class with a listening party, a kind of electronic popular music tasting menu. I kicked things off with “Umbrella” by Rihanna.

I chose this song because of its main drum loop, which is a factory sound that comes with GarageBand called Vintage Funk Kit 03–slow it down to 90 bpm and you’ll hear it. The first several class projects use GarageBand, and I like the students to feel like they’re being empowered to create real music in the class, not just performing academic exercises.

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Composing speech

Robert Davidson’s first-ever tweet is a remarkable one:

https://twitter.com/robcomposer/status/558447982807248896

Rob’s tweet raises three profound questions in my mind. Continue reading “Composing speech”

Listening, hearing, and the infinite loop

Rob Walker wrote a blog post listing different strategies for how to pay attention. (Update: he later wrote a whole book about it, I’m quoted in it.) Deep attention makes the difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. Rob is talking mostly to visual artists and designers, but his methods work well for musicians too–seeing is to looking as hearing is to listening. Paying attention is the most basic skill an artist needs in any medium, and one of the most basic skills a person needs in life. Not only does artistic practice require attention, but it also helps you learn attention. When you look critically at a painting or listen critically to a song, you are disciplining your attentional system.

Being able to focus deeply has its obvious practical benefits, but it’s also an invaluable tool for making your emotional life more manageable. It’s significant to me that the image below appears in two different Wikipedia articles: attention and flow.

Attention, and flow

When people ask me why we should study the arts, I think the attention argument is the best answer. The variety of deep attention known as mindfulness is a powerful antidepressant. Teaching the arts isn’t just about cultural preservation and transmission; it’s also a cost-effective public health measure. Music isn’t the only method for practicing your attention, but it’s one of the best. This post will address my preferred method for focusing my musical attention: the infinite loop.

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Subverting music education

Kratus, J. (2015). The Role of Subversion in Changing Music Education. In C. Randles (Ed.), Music Education: Navigating the Future (pp. 340–346). New York & London: Routledge.

Music Education: Navigating the Future

Here’s a horrifying story from John Kratus:

In 2009 I gave a presentation on collegiate curricular change in music for the Society for Music Teacher Education in Greensboro, North Carolina. One of the first slides in my presentation was an outline of Michigan State University’s degree requirements for the Bachelor of Music in Music Education. The outline included certain numbers of semesters for applied lessons, large ensembles, theory and ear training, and history and literature, as well as music education requirements including three tracks (instrumental, string, choral/general), introduction to music education, conducting, instrument and voice classes dependent on student teaching. I asked the audience members how many of them taught in a college program similar to that. Nearly every hand went up. Then I revealed that the program I described was taken from the Michigan State University Academic Programs book from 1959. The course descriptions, the performance repertoire, even the delivery of instruction were, for all, practical purposes, nearly unchanged in 50 years.

Kratus goes on to say that music education is way more than fifty years out of date.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the type of music education provided to contemporary collegiate music majors has deep roots in the conservatories of European capitols of the 19th century. In fact more than its roots are located there–21st-century collegiate music has retained the stems, branches, leaves, flowers, seeds, and pollen of its 200-year-old predecessors.

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How to tell funk from disco

Funk and disco overlap broadly, but they are not the same thing. Funk lovers like me instinctively know what the difference is. But how do we know? One thing we could do is point to the beat. Disco uses that iconic four-to-the-floor pattern, and funk doesn’t, so case closed, right? Well, it’s not so simple. Four-on-the-floor is more common in funk than you would think, and while it’s common in disco, it’s not universal. So maybe you could point to production: disco is glossy and smooth, while funk is raw and edgy. This is better, but it’s still too vague. The best way to distinguish funk from disco is to look at harmony. Specifically, we can look at how much a given song uses blues tonality. Disco uses all kinds of harmony, but funk is dominated by one specific kind: blues tonality. Disco might incorporate touches of  blues, but blues tonality is the harmonic foundation of funk.

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DJ Earworm on the art of the mashup

DJ Earworm is the foremost practitioner of the art of the mashup. I don’t think there’s a more interesting musician in the world right now. I was on public radio with him once! His main claim to fame is the United State of Pop series, where he combines the top 25 US pop songs of a given year into a single, seamlessly coherent track. I’ve scattered several of them throughout this post. He has started doing more seasonal mashups as well; here’s one from this past summer:

It’s rare that an artist talks you through their production process in depth, so I was delighted to discover that DJ Earworm wrote an entire book about mashup production. He wrote it in 2007 and focused it on Sony Acid, so from a technical standpoint, it might not be super useful to you. But as with the KLF’s pop songwriting tutorial, the creative method he espouses transcends technology and time period, and it would be of value to any musician. Some choice passages follow.

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Terry Riley and Taylor Swift

I don’t have much of a relationship to… what should we call it? Modern classical music? That’s the term commonly used by ignoramuses like me, but it’s a silly one, contradictory on its face. The practitioners themselves call it “new music,” which is even worse, since it implies that all that other music out there that’s new is not really music. Steve Reich has the best term: notated music. It’s accurate and non-judgmental, and it encompasses the vast range of styles currently being explored by composers. Anyway, I don’t have much of a relationship to notated music. Terry Riley is a name that people in my circle throw around, but I hadn’t listened closely to him until I read an amazing New Music Box post about him. More on that below.

Terry Riley’s most salient influence on my musical life comes from A Rainbow In Curved Air. Fans of The Who will immediately recognize it as the template for the intro to “Baba O’Riley.”

Riley’s pattern-sequenced organ also inspired a ton of prog rock and ambient electronica. However, this post is not about A Rainbow In Curved Air. It’s about the piece that cemented Riley’s place in the High Culture Canon: In C.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjR4QYsa9nE

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