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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When MusicRadar assigned me to write about Oasis, I was not overjoyed. I figured I would start with the Wonderwall meme and go from there. Once you move past the joke, though, it becomes an interesting question: why did this seemingly unremarkable song become such a standard for amateur guitarists?
The Grateful Dead sold a lot of concert tickets and a respectable number of albums, but it took them more than twenty years to have a top ten hit. When “Touch of Grey” broke out, it inspired a debate among the Deadheads: on the one hand, its popularity ruined the experience of going to shows, …
The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, …
In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …
Minor keys are complicated, because there are so many different minor scales. Major keys seem simpler, because there is only the one major scale. At least, that is how things worked in Western Europe between 1700 and 1900. In present-day Anglo-American pop, though, we need to expand our idea of what a major key is.
This week in aural skills we are improvising sung countermelodies over various chord progressions. The goal is to help the students feel the voice leading, the chromatic alterations and so on. This is especially important for playing over secondary dominants or “applied chords” as classical theory folks call them. I won’t explain these chords in …
Motivic development is more of a classical music thing than a rock/pop thing. If you want to hear a motive carried through a series of elaborations and variations, you should look to Beethoven rather than the Beatles. Pop songs are a few riffs, repeated or strung together. But there are some songs out there whose …
We’re getting started on melody in pop aural skills by talking about embellishing tones. The word “embellish” is from the Old French embelliss-, meaning to make something beautiful by ornamenting it. To understand what embellishing tones are, you first need to know about the tones they are embellishing. In Western tonal music and (non-blues-based) Anglo-American …
This week in aural skills, we are practicing identifying pop schemas, that is, chord sequences and loops that occur commonly in various kinds of Anglo-American top 40, rock, R&B and related styles. We previously covered the permutations of I, IV and V and the plagal cadence. Now we’re getting into progressions that bring in the rest …
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