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 …
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This summer I am writing more music theory teaching materials for beginners. In this post, I will be explaining major thirds, minor thirds, major chords, and minor chords. So, what are these things? The definitions are annoyingly circular. A major third is the interval between the first and third degrees of the major scale. And …
The final topic in pop aural skills is harmonic sequences, strings of chords whose roots move in a predictable interval pattern. Sequences are common in European classical music. Listen to Bach’s Chaconne from the D Minor Violin Partita or Contrapunctus VIII from The Art of Fugue for a million examples. Sequences are also pretty common …
In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a …
How do you improvise a countermelody? Listen to things in the music and respond: imitate, vary, fill in gaps. Which tracks, though? Start with music that is harmonically uncomplicated enough that you can predict where it’s going, but with enough rhythmic interest to give you something to react to. I do not recommend the blues …
This is an exciting week of class for me, because we are analyzing blues melodies, and that is a music-theoretic subject that is close to my heart. Given its impact on the past hundred years of Anglo-American popular culture, the blues has been the subject of a shockingly small amount of musicological analysis. The best …
Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose …
Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some …
It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important …
We are wrapping up the harmony unit of pop aural skills class with harmonized basslines. These sound more “classical” than the other material we’re covering, and for good reason. Long before Western Europeans thought in terms of chords, they saw harmony as something that emerged from the interaction of multiple simultaneous melodies. Baroque composers frequently …
