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 pop, the main melody notes are (usually) found within the underlying chords. For example, if the song has a C chord, then the main melody notes over that chord will (probably) be the notes C, E, or G. Any other melody note will be an embellishing tone.

There are many different kinds of melodic embellishments, but we will be dealing with just four: passing tones, neighbor tones, appoggiatura, and escape tones. Continue reading

Identifying song forms

Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some structures work so much better than others, I am not aware of it. The best approach I can recommend is to examine the most widely used structures across styles and eras and try to internalize them. Transcribing songs at the structural level is a great way to do that. Staff notation is not the right tool for the job, because you can’t easily zoom out and see the big picture. I like to use Ableton Live to annotate and color-code audio and MIDI. Here’s “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads. 

I also like the bubble diagrams you can make with Audio Timeliner, because it lets you group sections together at multiple levels. The downside is that you can’t easily zoom into the bars and beats level, or show meter and hypermeter.

In this post, I’ll talk through examples of three common structures: strophic form, AABA form, and verse-chorus form (the one that “Burning Down The House” uses). Then I’ll get into the difficult question of form in groove-based music.

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Identifying phrase structure

It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important to figure out, because if you aspire to write or improvise music, having control over your phrasing might be the most important thing you need. If you can organize your phrases, you can have limited technique and knowledge of theory and still sound good. If you can’t organize your phrases, all the technique and theory in the world won’t be much help.

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Identifying pentatonic scales

It’s pentatonic scales week in aural skills class. This would seem to be the easiest thing on the syllabus, but I discovered while doing listening exercises with the students that even these simple scales have their subtleties.

Major Pentatonic

You can understand the C major pentatonic scale to be the C major scale without scale degrees four and seven. These are the ones that create all the tension and dissonance, and without them, the major pentatonic sounds uncomplicatedly sunny and cheerful. (Or does it? More on that in a minute.) Click the image to play the scale in the aQWERTYon.

You can easily explore the G-flat major pentatonic scale: it’s the black keys on the piano. Guitarists will find that G major pentatonic is particularly easy to play. (Too bad they can’t so easily play it with the pianists.)

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Call Me Maybe

For the first day of my new pop-oriented Aural Skills II class at NYU, we analyzed “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. I have been using this song as a listening example in music tech classes for many years because it is the apex of maximalist brickwall-limited caterpillar-waveform 21st century pop production. In the music tech context, I tend not to talk much about the song itself, but it’s a perfect entry point into pop aural skills too. Here’s the video, in case you have been trapped in a well since 2012.

Delightful though the song is, at first it seemed to me to be too simple and repetitive to be interesting from a notes-on-the-page perspective. However, once I dug in, I found more going on than I had thought.

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Jack Straw

After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think the best of the Dead’s cowboy songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Jack Straw”.

When I was a kid, my older stepbrother had a bunch of Dead albums stored in our apartment. I avoided listening to them at first because their covers suggested that they would be too heavy and frightening for my tastes. Imagine my surprise when I finally did try them and they turned out to be affable psychedelic country. I first heard “Jack Straw” on What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been, the hugely better of the two Grateful Dead greatest hits compilations. (The other is Skeletons from the Closet, which has some baffling choices – “Mexicali Blues”, why?)

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Whisper Not

When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It’s a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: “A Child Is Born” by Thad Jones, “Lil’ Darlin’” by Neal Hefti, and “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson. I have to give it up to the producer for that sequencing; the obvious move would have been to end the album on “Lil’ Darlin'”, but instead, just when you’ve been lulled into a peaceful slumber, “Whisper Not” opens up a whole new and unexpected atmosphere of nocturnal mystery. I rewound this part of the tape endlessly.

Here’s a live performance of Benny Golson playing “Whisper Not” with the Jazz Messengers in France in 1958, along with Art Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet,  Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Golson gives some insight into his compositional process in this Jazzwax interview with Marc Meyers. Continue reading

Love Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops

I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from the peak disco era, and “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club (1981) sits at the crossover point between disco, new wave and early hip-hop. Let’s start with “Love Rollercoaster”.

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The Beastie Boys, James Newton, and phonographic orality

One of the most complicated copyright situations covered in my Musical Borrowing class is the landmark sampling lawsuit Newton v. Diamond. “Newton” is jazz flutist and composer James Newton, not to be confused with James Newton Howard. “Diamond” is Michael Diamond, aka Mike D of the Beastie Boys. The song at issue is the Beasties’ “Pass the Mic” (1992).

The flute sample in the intro and throughout comes from James Newton’s piece “Choir” (1982).

If you want to sample legally, you need two separate licenses: one from the owner of the audio recording (typically a record label) and one from the owner of the underlying song or composition (typically the songwriter or composer, or their publisher.) The Beastie Boys got permission to use the recording of “Choir” from James Newton’s label, ECM, and paid a license fee. They did not, however, seek permission from Newton himself. ECM didn’t ask Newton either, and he didn’t even find out about the sample until eight years later, at which point he sued the Beasties for copyright infringement.

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Bemsha Swing

I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their way into it, and I walk around humming or whistling it  too. I like to think of my relationship with the tune as more symbiotic than parasitic, but either way, the tune is well and truly embedded in me. I don’t know how it was able to take such firm root, but maybe over the course of writing the post, some ideas will suggest themselves.

Monk co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with drummer Denzil Best. KUVO explains that they originally copyrighted it under the title “Bimsha Swing”, referring to “Bimshire”, a nickname for Denzil Best’s family home of Barbados. Monk first recorded it in 1952 with Gary Mapp on bass and Max Roach on drums. 

Shame on Prestige Records for not bothering to tune the piano! But this happened to Monk a lot in the early days. I wonder how much of his style was driven by the need to make out-of-tune pianos sound good? He always managed to make them sing. In a Yamaha showroom, I saw a demo of their Spirio system, where they had extracted the piano notes from a video of Monk playing live, and they were being played back on a Disklavier. It was uncanny to hear that distinctive Monk-ian touch on a perfectly in-tune brand new grand piano right there in the room with me.

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