This year, in addition to teaching my first NYU pop music theory class, I also taught two semesters of pop aural skills. If you didn’t go through a university music program, you may not know what aural skills class involves. Traditionally, you identify chords and intervals by ear, practice sight-singing, and do dictation (meaning, you …
Tag Archives: popular music pedagogy
My year in pop music theory teaching
See also: my year in pop aural skills teaching This year I taught my first theory class in NYU’s new popular music sequence. It was not my first music theory class, or my first pop music class, but it was the first one in a university-level sequence dedicated specifically to pop. I think it mostly …
Jason Yust on the racist history of tonality
I haven’t done any culture war material lately, but Jason Yust recently published an article in the Journal of Music Theory with the title “Tonality and Racism“, and I couldn’t not respond. The arguments in the paper are relevant to my teaching life in NYU’s new and wonderful pop theory and aural skills sequence. These classes …
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Stormy Monday
Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented …
Don’t Know Why
I needed a song with lots of secondary dominants in it for aural skills class, and I realized that Norah Jones’ adult-contemporary smash “Don’t Know Why” has a bunch of them. The song came out in 2002, though it could have been recorded at any time in the 50 years previous.
The melodic-harmonic divorce in pop
This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It’s so common, in fact, …
Adding vocal harmony to a Tears for Fears song
My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song: Here’s the acapella. I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a …
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Modern Band Music Theory
I met Dr Jim Frankel, the founder of MusicFirst, back when I was a grad student. We have been mutual admirers in a passive way since then. It was a pleasant surprise when, over the summer, he asked me to contribute to their new Modern Band curriculum, specifically, the music theory component. It’s now being …
I wrote another rap song to inspire my Pop Practicum students
I’m making my students in the NYU Popular Music Practicum write and perform original rap verses. To encourage them, I wrote one too, like I did last year. The samples are from Erroll Garner’s recording of “Close To You” by the Carpenters.
I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too
The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort …
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