This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing …
Tag Archives: Danny Elfman
The whole tone scale
Like diminished chords, the whole tone scale is not very widely used, but when you need that specific vibe, nothing else will do. Whole tone scales are easy to understand, because there are only two of them total. Whichever key you are in, there is a whole tone scale that includes the tonic, and another …