When I was in college, I liked to dip into the dollar bin at the record store. That’s where I picked up Jerry Garcia’s second solo album. It was forgettable, even for an obsessive fan like me. Forgettable, that is, except for one song:
I had never heard of Django Reinhardt at that point, and I had no idea what I was hearing. All I knew was that I loved it. Jerry Garcia had his ups and downs as an artist, but he always had great taste in other people’s music.
Music ed folks! If you need some PD credit this summer, check out the online Annual Back-to-School Symposium presented by the good people at F-Flat Books. Heather Fortune and I are doing a session on groove and improvisation in ensemble classes.
The lineup includes some of the people I admire most in the field: Brandi Waller-Pace, Shane Colquhoun, Steve Giddings, Kat Reinhert, and many others. Expect to learn a thing or two.
In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale variants.
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.
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.
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.)
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:
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.
(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.
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.
