Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently. https://twitter.com/olabscott/status/1270192351215005697 I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.
Tag Archives: pedagogical remixing
Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation
Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left …
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Clair de Lune
I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural …
Toni Blackman on the wisdom of the cypher
Toni Blackman is one of the three hip-hop educators I’m studying for my dissertation. She teaches freestyle rap as a way to build authentic confidence, and she gave a talk and a workshop on the subject at Ableton’s 2018 Loop Summit. Ableton recently posted the video of Toni’s talk. She concludes it with a freestyle, …
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Funky Minuet in G major
In my continuing quest to learn the classical canon through remixing with Ableton Live, I’ve taken on Bach’s Minuet in G major. Which is apparently not by Bach at all, but rather by some guy named Christian Petzold. Live and learn. A minuet is a dance, but in 2018, it’s hard to dance in triple meter. …
Hip-hop as a tool for hip-hop ethnography
I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production …
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My music technology syllabus
This is now out of date, see the current version I use variations on this project list for all of my courses. In Advanced Digital Audio Production at Montclair State University, students do all of these assignments. Students in Music Technology 101 do all of them except the ones marked Advanced. My syllabus for the …
Teaching myself the Bach Chaconne with Ableton Live
Recently someone posted this performance of the Chaconne from Bach’s violin partita in D minor on an eleven-string guitar by Moran Wasser. My favorite interpretation by an actual violinist is Viktoria Mullova’s. I appreciate her straightforward and unsentimental approach. I also enjoy the version from Morimur, and I’m not alone. It’s one of the most …
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