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 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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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 …
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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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 …
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.
In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy …
At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine: I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make …
Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack …
Every major key has a relative minor key. Think of it as an evil twin sibling. Relative minors are very widely used but not so widely understood. In particular, there’s a lot of confusion around the fact that major keys and their relative minors share the same key signatures and (mostly) the same pitches. But …
