I got a question from a Twitter friend: Oh @ethanhein, a blues tonality Q for you: On Muddy Waters’s “Double Trouble,” on the LP Sings Big Bill, James Cotton opens his harp solo w/a note so ripe it almost derails the record —yet somehow it works. My Q: what makes that note so bracing? Link: …
Tag Archives: music theory
I Want To Hold Your Hand
My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on …
Why are there so many minor scales
I wrote this explainer for my New School students; maybe you will find it useful too. The white keys on the piano don’t just have to play C major. If you play the white keys over a droning or repeated A, you get a very different-sounding scale. It has a few different names: the A …
Tuning is hard
I am committed to teaching my students something about the history of tuning in Western European music. I don’t expect them to retain any details or do any math, I just want them to know that the history exists. In preparation, I continue to refine my explanation of this history to myself. Before the year …
The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School
Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of …
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Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes
Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers get all persnickety about using the correct name. This confusion applies to all of the black keys, but in this post, I’ll be …
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Bach’s Lute Suite in G minor
I don’t get a lot of music-related correspondence on LinkedIn, so I was surprised when a stranger wrote me a very nice message there about my deep dive into the Bach Chaconne. He mentioned that he was learning the prelude to the Lute Suite in G Minor, BWV 995, and that he liked Göran Söllscher’s …
Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues
There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41. Before we can get into the details of this note and what …
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Making Flippy Floppy
Somebody suggested that I transcribe all the Talking Heads songs. I won’t do that, but I do seem to be in the process of analyzing all of my favorites. There are a bunch! Here’s one. I assume that the title is a sexual euphemism? If so, it’s a weird one. In addition to the four …
Lonely Woman
I have always had a hard time with Ornette Coleman, but I love “Lonely Woman”, because it manages to be both extremely weird and extremely catchy. Notice that at 2:09 during Ornette’s solo, someone goes “Woo!” Rightly so.