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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Building Hip-Hop Educators – new book chapter abstract

Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing my chapter with Toni Blackman, a central figure in my dissertation. Our working title is Building Hip-Hop Educators. Here’s the abstract.

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Bach Anxiety

Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:

I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in! Continue reading

Take Me To The River

See the complete Talking Heads series

The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges.

Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, the horns are by the Memphis Horns, and the strings are by the Memphis Strings. The Reverend Al dedicated the song to his cousin Junior Parker.

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V7-I cadences as harmonic whiteness

If you study music theory in a typical school setting, you might get the idea that the V-I cadence is the fundamental cornerstone of all harmony, or at least, of all “Western” harmony. In a standard theory course, V-I is the first chord progression that you study, and for several weeks or months, it may be the only one you study. Here’s a representative quote from School of Composition:

In tonal music, the dominant chord is just as important as the tonic because it’s the chord that makes us want the tonic. Even if we’re not aware of it, hearing the dominant chord makes us expect its tonic.

It’s THE chord that makes us want the tonic. Even if we’re not aware of it! But that is only true within a certain stylistic context: the music of Western European aristocracy between 1700 and 1900, and the musics descending from it. The conventions of Western Europe’s aristocracy have been very influential, especially in formal academic settings. However, they don’t encompass all the tonal music in our culture. A defining feature of harmony in Black American music is the de-emphasis or elimination of the V-I cadence.

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The politics is in the drums: Producing and composing in the music classroom

This post was published in the Journal of Popular Music Education!

Pierre Schaeffer and DJ Premier

Introduction

Digital audio workstation software, recording equipment and MIDI controllers have become steadily less expensive and easier to learn over the past two decades. As a result, it has become possible for schools at all levels to offer “an art class for music” (Kuhn & Hein, 2021) in which students learn to write and produce original songs. However, music teachers in the United States usually find themselves unprepared to teach such a class. University music education programs focus on the performance and history of Western art music to the near exclusion of all else. When these programs address electronic music, it is usually in the context of “art” music. It is extremely rare for a preservice music teacher to learn to produce dance music or hip-hop.

As I write this, music technology courses are becoming more the norm than the exception in American university music programs, at least as electives, and are spreading rapidly throughout secondary schools as well. The coronavirus pandemic has driven a rapid adoption of technology-driven instruction out of necessity. The curriculum standards, subject matter and classroom practices of school music technology courses are still very much in flux. The music education field therefore has a unique opportunity to shape and define music technology as a subject before it becomes fully standardized. I will argue that it is not enough to teach preservice music teachers the skills needed to create electronic musics. Music educators must also engage with aesthetics and cultural contexts. It is particularly important that they critically examine the racialized divide between “art” and “popular” music.

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Boogie Chillen

Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.

The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.

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Music is not a universal language and this klezmer song proves it

My man Adam has a word:

I can prove this with an example from my own life. When I was younger I got interested in my Jewish heritage and spent a couple of years playing klezmer music (shout out to F Train Klezmer!) There’s a beautiful tune called “Der Gassen Nigun”, in a minor key, with a moderate lurching waltz tempo and a dirgelike wailing melody. Here’s a lovely recording of it, by Harry Kandel and his Orchestra.

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I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too

The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort zones.

Students have the option to write their verses from scratch, or to use existing verses as a template–Toni Blackman recommends this one and this one. They can rhyme over an existing instrumental or create their own beats, but they are not allowed to rap unaccompanied, because I don’t want them doing slam poetry. There is nothing wrong with slam poetry, but the purpose of this assignment is to experience the joy and terror of trying to ride a beat.

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Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?

Everyone’s favorite music theorist is back in the news. If you are curious about the controversy surrounding him and don’t have a music theory background, I wrote a Twitter thread for you:

However, maybe you don’t feel like wading through a long Twitter stream of consciousness, and would rather read a coherent blog post instead. Read on!

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