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 harmonized basslines

We are wrapping up the harmony unit of pop aural skills class with harmonized basslines. These sound more “classical” than the other material we’re covering, and for good reason. Long before Western Europeans thought in terms of chords, they saw harmony as something that emerged from the interaction of multiple simultaneous melodies. Baroque composers frequently wrote pieces using ground bass, formulaic basslines that act as a foundation for counterpoint. (Bach used ground bass for the Passacaglia and Fugue and the Chaconne.) Galant composers used schemas, short figures combining basslines and contrapuntal melodies that you use as points of departure for larger compositions. And many European composers in the 17th and 18th centuries honed their skills with partimento, basslines that you improvised counterpoint on top of according to particular rules.

Some the Baroque ground bass patterns and galant schemas persist in the vocabulary of Anglo-American pop, though with fewer rules about the correct way to harmonize them. Continue reading

Identifying standard pop chord progressions

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 of the diatonic family, that is, the chords you can make using the notes in the major and natural minor scales.

Singer-Songwriter/Axis progression

A huge percentage of current mainstream pop and rock songs are built on the four-legged stool of the I, IV, V and vi chords. In C, those are C, F, G, and Am. You can find these chords in any order, but there’s a particularly inescapable sequence that my NYU colleagues call the singer-songwriter progression: I, V, vi, IV, which in C is C, G, Am, F.

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Identifying I, IV and V chords

The I, IV and V chords are beginner-level music theory concepts. However, in my pop-oriented aural skills class, we are covering them in the context of the blues, where they are more complicated than they are in the standard tonal theory context. Let’s begin with a review of the basic I, IV and V from the major scale. Here they are in C.

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Identifying added-note chords

My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scales. It is intimidating to try to learn to distinguish between C7, C9, C13, C7sus4, C9sus4 and C13sus4, but they are really just different combinations of the notes in C Mixolydian mode, and they all convey a similar “Mixolydian-ness”. But before we get to those, let’s start with extended chords you can make from regular old C major.

Major scale chords

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Things I wrote in 2023

This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.

The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.

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NYU Steinhardt is assigning this blog in its music theory and aural skills core classes

Last night I went to a holiday party for NYU Steinhardt’s music education program, where I got my PhD and where I have been teaching the Technology and Pop Practicum courses for several years now. Steinhardt has been overhauling its core music theory and aural skills curricula, and while I am highly interested in this process, I have not been involved in it. I have a lot of opinions about this, but not much credentialing in music theory pedagogy. At the party, a student told me that her theory and aural skills teachers are assigning her a lot of material from this blog. This was news to me. I’m flattered, of course, but also sad, because no one has talked to me about it, much less invited me to teach any of the classes. Like I said, I know my formal CV doesn’t really support that, but if the blog is good enough to assign…

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Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education

Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and Marlon Richardson, aka UnLearn the World (another devastatingly great freestyle rapper). Several other emcees showed up, including one of my main hip-hop peer educators, Roman The Mafioso, pictured below.

After the panel, all the emcees got into a cypher. At first they were rapping over a DJ, while a few NYU kids tried to play along on saxophones and piano. Then the DJ paused and folks tried rapping over just the NYU music students’ instrumental accompaniment. Roman gently trolled the NYU kids: “Keep it steady, keep it steady.” They did better when Steff Reed jumped on the piano and replaced their uncertain jazz with thumping gospel. Listening to this, I felt what I always feel in a cypher: that freestyle rap is the most advanced and sophisticated form of music I have ever heard in my life.

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Dissertation summary

I applied for something that asked for a ten page summary of my doctoral dissertation. Maybe you would like to read it, rather than the full 300 pages?

Learning Something Deep: Teaching to Learn and Learning to Teach Hip-Hop in New York City (summary)

Image: Toni Blackman leads a middle school songwriting workshop

In this dissertation, I present a narrative of learning to teach hip-hop, and of teaching to learn hip-hop. I document my process of learning hip-hop music education methods from practitioners, and of teaching music education students with those methods. The narrative begins with my inquiry into how hip-hop might best be included in school music programs, or more specifically, into the preparation of pre-service music teachers. I profile three hip-hop educators: teachers and teaching artists whose practice uses hip-hop music, aesthetics, and values to advance social justice goals. I then discuss putting these educators’ approaches into practice in a music education course that I taught at New York University. I examine the experiences and perspectives of students in this course in order to assess its effectiveness. Finally, I use all of the above to inform my proposed suggestions for the roles that hip-hop might play in university-level music education programs generally.

Throughout the study, I ask the following questions: What is hip-hop music education? What are its goals? What are its methods? How do we practice it ethically? In order to answer these questions, along with additional related and emergent questions, I situate the study in the larger context of popular music pedagogy in high schools, in teaching artist practices in school and community settings, and in the university programs that prepare teachers to do this work. I explore the role that hip-hop methods can play in the preparation of pre-service music educators. In particular, I examine the ways that hip-hop music education can support critical praxis and challenge the white racial frame of American music education.

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