We’re coming up on blues melody day in aural skills class. I always like to do some close listening to Aretha Franklin for that session, especially her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I haven’t done any analysis of it; we just listen and let it speak for itself. But I thought, this semester, I …
Continue reading “Aretha Franklin sings “Bridge Over Troubled Water””
I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the …
I am mildly obsessed with this recording, both as a work of art and as a music teaching resource. While I have mentioned this track several times on here, I haven’t really dug into the details. So it’s time to change that. There’s a lot to talk about: the genre, the chords, the melody, the …
I have Bob Dylan on the brain, because my socials are saturated with ads for the Timothee Chalamet movie, and because MusicRadar used the movie as the news hook for a column about Bob. I rewatched Don’t Look Back for the first time in forever. It’s a sign of my advancing age that Bob came …
Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented …
The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another …
This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I …
Continue reading “The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory”
I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several …
Continue reading “Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic”
As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and …
Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we …
