I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …
Tag Archives: Chris Thile
Human Behaviour
Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them! This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video …
Perpetual motion in Bach’s E major Violin Partita Prelude
In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, …
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White people with acoustic instruments covering rap songs
I turned this post into an academic journal article with proper citations–click to read it in Visions of Research in Music Education. Also see the Adam Neely video! White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial …
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