I didn’t find out about hypermeter until very late in my music theory learning journey. I think it should be part of the basic toolkit, especially for songwriters and improvisers. The explanation that follows might seem abstract, but behind the scenes, hypermeter provides the signposts that orient you in medium-scale musical time. The term “hypermeter” …
Author Archives: Ethan
Identifying augmented chords
Augmented chords don’t come up much, but they are on the aural skills syllabus, and they have that specific quality that no other harmony can create. Their uncanny zero-gravity quality is the result of their symmetry. Any note in an augmented triad could function as its root. When you write the augmented chords on the …
MusicRadar column on “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” and “Soul Makossa”
This month in MusicRadar, I explain my favorite Michael Jackson song and my favorite song of the 1980s generally, enjoy.
Identifying tritone substitutions
This is one of those jazz theory ideas that gets explained endlessly online and in texts and is relatively rare in a typical American’s listening experience. But when you do hear it, it does sound cool. I made an interactive explainer on Noteflight, because as with so many jazz theory concepts, tritone substitutions make more …
Identifying modulations
In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a …
Improvising over secondary dominants
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 …
Improvising countermelodies
How do you improvise a countermelody? Listen to things in the music and respond: imitate, vary, fill in gaps. Which tracks, though? Start with music that is harmonically uncomplicated enough that you can predict where it’s going, but with enough rhythmic interest to give you something to react to. I do not recommend the blues …
Identifying blues melodies
This is an exciting week of class for me, because we are analyzing blues melodies, and that is a music-theoretic subject that is close to my heart. Given its impact on the past hundred years of Anglo-American popular culture, the blues has been the subject of a shockingly small amount of musicological analysis. The best …
Identifying melodic motives
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 …
Identifying embellishing tones
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 …