Against Music Theory – some commentary

My fellow music tech student Laura Dickens had some thoughts about my recent music theory rant. This is a lightly edited version of our Facebook conversation.

Laura: Have you ever read any Susan McClary? I feel like you could probably get into that…

Me: Yes! Susan McClary is the best! She shares my belief in the joy of repetition.

Laura: Personally, I loved music theory when it became more about analysis and interpretation, and less about doing endless counterpoint exercises. All music theory is is a way of understanding music from the past, using certain rules gleaned from that music and seeing how those rules are played with by certain composers and and how those rules changed over time… although I agree with you that theory as it is taught in big institutions is very Eurocentric. It is a tool for analysis, and learning all those boring counterpoint rules aren’t so that you can then go out and write a bunch of chorales… it’s more like learning to read middle English so that you can read/analyze some Chaucer. Or learning about 17th century poetic/styles forms in order to which still influence the way poems are written today… So that’s why I think music theory is important/useful.

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Against music theory

I am mercifully finished with music theory in grad school and couldn’t be happier about it. You may find this surprising. My blog is full of music theory. How could a guy who enjoys thinking about music in analytical terms as much as I do have such a wretched time in my graduate music theory classes? It wasn’t the work, I mostly breezed through that. No, it was the grinding Eurocentrism. Common-practice period classical music theory is fine and good, but as presented in a typical theory core, it’s dry, tedious, and worst of all, largely useless to a musician like me. The strict rules of eighteenth-century European art music are distantly removed from the knowledge that I need to do anything in the present-day music world (except, I guess, to become a professor of common-practice tonal theory.)

The title of this post is a reference to the Susan Sontag essay, “Against Interpretation.” She argues that by ignoring the subjective sensual pleasures of art and instead looking for rigorously logical theories of its inner workings, academics are missing the point. She calls scholarly interpretation “the intellect’s revenge upon art.” I’m with her. Music theory as practiced at NYU and elsewhere is the intellectual’s revenge on music. Sontag’s punchline is right on: “[I]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Speak it, sister!

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Miley vs Sinéad

I don’t know whether you’ve been following the feud between Miley Cyrus and Sinéad O’Connor, and if you haven’t, congratulations on using your free time more constructively than I use mine. But so anyway, the most infamous pop star of the moment (Miley) publically cited a well-respected elder stateswoman (Sinéad) as an influence. In response, Sinéad wrote Miley an open letter about how she should stop letting her unscrupulous management treat her like a prostitute. Miley sassed back on Twitter, Sinéad wrote an angrier open letter in response, the whole internet got involved, and around and around the whole thing continues to go.

Then this wiseacre did a mashup of Miley’s current hit, “Wrecking Ball,” with Sinéad’s signature tune, a cover of “Nothing Compares 2U” by Prince.

The thing about this is that I know it was meant as a joke, but it works extremely well musically, almost better than either of the originals. Miley wasn’t kidding when she cited Sinéad as an influence. Their sexual politics may differ, but their singing styles are uncannily similar, right down to the vocal fry. Sometimes a good mashup illuminates more than all the prose ever will.

ComposerQuest podcast with Marc Weidenbaum

Quick note to say that one of my tracks appears in a podcast by Charlie McCarron, “Social Sound Experiments with Marc Weidenbaum.” Marc is the visionary mind behind the Disquiet Junto and is a thoughtful speaker on the nature of sound art, its relationship to music, and how to be a good critic, composer and listener. The track they used is one of my recent Junto submissions. Happy listening.

https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/interstellar-space

Experience designers design experiences

Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Morgan & Claypool.

For this week’s reading on experience design for music education, we moved up a level to think about experience design generally. A lot of design theory tends to boil down to “Design things better!” Marc Hassenzahl’s book falls into that trap a little, but he does have some useful specific ideas. His main thesis is that designers of technology aren’t just designing the technology itself. They’re designing the felt experience of using the technology (intentionally or not.) People care less about the technology itself and more about how they feel while using it.

Are You Experienced?

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Drum Loop programming lesson concept images

Nearly getting scooped by Loopseque lit a fire under me to get some more concept images for my thesis app together. So here are some examples of the beat programming lessons that form the intellectual heart of my project. The general idea is that you’re given an existing drum pattern, a famous breakbeat or something more generic. Some of the beats are locked down, guaranteeing that anything you do will sound musical. Click each one to see it bigger.

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Another radial drum machine

I’ve been working on my thesis app this whole time in the serene knowledge that there’s very little precedent for what I’m trying to do. However, I just learned that I’m wrong, that there’s an app out there with a lot of broad similarities to mine: Loopseque, made by Casual Underground. At first glance, I was alarmed; had I been scooped? Has all my work been in vain? The superficial similarities are hard to miss:

Loopseque

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Music students and maker culture

For Alex Ruthmann’s class, we’re reading Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life by the late Steve Dillon. If you can get past the academic verbiage, there’s some valuable technomusicology here, and some tremendous advocacy resources too.

Spongebob has imagination

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Radial drum machine update

I’m planning to be done with my thesis by (gulp) December. My collaborator Chris and I got a basic prototype of the radial drum machine together over the summer using Max and Javascript. What we learned is that you don’t want to do an audio app in Max and Javascript, since it will be single-threaded and slower than molasses in January. Since then, we’ve been building the iOS version, which is going to include more features and be closer to the version I have in my head.

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Designing music learning experiences with technology

This semester I’m working as a research assistant to Alex Ruthmann at NYU. The job includes helping him with a new joint music education and music technology  class, Designing Technologies & Experiences for Music Making, Learning and Engagement. Here’s the bibliography. The central class project is to create a music education technology experience — a lesson plan or classroom activity, a piece of software or hardware, or something outside those categories.

Everyone in the class has to maintain a blog documenting their design process. (Wouldn’t it be cool if every teacher of everything had their students blog about their class work?) My music education experience design is going to be my thesis, which I’m already blogging about. So instead I’ll use these posts for some public-facing note taking.

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