Toni Blackman recommends a rap writing exercise: take an existing flow and replace the lyrics with your own. In order to do this with my music education students in the spring, I’m going to provide them with notated transcriptions as well as recordings. I’ve transcribed a couple of Toni’s recommended verses. The first was KRS-One’s …
Tag Archives: visualization
Jazzy harmony and crazy tuplets in Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1
Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 …
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I learned how to make animated gifs
Diatonic chords from the C major scale:
Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata
Beethoven is famous for writing huge epic structures. But he could write memorable tunes, too, and the second movement of the “Pathétique Sonata” contains a particularly good one. It’s best to known to my age cohort from Schroder’s performance: Here’s my Ableton Live visualization:
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 …
Perpetual motion in Bach’s E major Violin Partita Prelude
In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, …
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Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants
Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …
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Teaching note values
Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this …
Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante
Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me. …
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Chord progressions in the Bach Chaconne
Recently I have been digging deep into the Bach Chaconne. Since I’m a poor music reader, I’ve been using Ableton Live to remix, loop, and analyze the piece, both in audio and MIDI form. It’s working! The structure of the Chaconne makes sense to me now when I hear it, and I’m learning to play …