Swing primer

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington

Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing:

Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African diaspora: ragtime, blues, musical theater, country, R&B, rock, funk, reggae, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and so on. The best way to learn about swing is through aural and hands-on experience. The Groove Pizza is a good way to get started.

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The NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum

This year, for the first time, I’m co-teaching the NYU Steinhardt Music Education Popular Music Practicum with Dr Kimberly McCord. Kimberly is doing the first half of the semester, and I’m doing the second half. She’s covering live performance and improvisation in the rock and “modern band” idioms, and I’m doing songwriting and remixing in the hip-hop and dance music idioms. This is an opportunity to put some my long-standing theories into practice, so I am excited.

Here’s a summary of what we’re doing.

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Brandon Bennett interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. Here I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Brandon Bennett that I recorded on September 22, 2020 in Washington Square Park. The remix is made from the twenty most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of several hours of conversation.

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Adam Neely video on rap covers

I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See the result here:

Seeing Adam’s process from the inside gives me great respect for his skills as an editor. He had a list of questions for the interview, but it was free-flowing and jumped around on many tangents. The tight and logical sequence of ideas you see above is the result of postproduction. 

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Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio.

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Mothership Connection

In high school, my friend Aubin, who was much cooler than me, told me I needed to go listen to some Parliament. I bought a cassette of The Clones of Dr Funkenstein, probably just because of its title. I liked it immediately, how could you not? But thirty-ish years later, I am still struggling to wrap my head around its implications. George Clinton’s playfulness can easily mislead you into thinking he’s a clown, but he is really more like a prophet.

There’s plenty of good analysis out there of the P-Funk mythology and its place in Afrofuturism. That is fascinating and important material. But I don’t see enough written about the actual music. So here I will do my part to rectify the imbalance, starting with the song that calls down the landing of the Holy Mothership.

For proper context, check out this live version of “Mothership Connection” from Halloween 1976–start at 37:25. It’s almost twice as long as the studio version, even though the tempo is faster. The lead vocalist is the incredible Glenn Goins, who died of cancer just two years after this was filmed.

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What does it mean to remix the classical canon

Here’s an exciting thing that happened recently.

I didn’t have an explicitly anti-racist motivation when I started making the remixes, but if they’re being received that way, I’m delighted. In this post, I’m going to do some thinking out loud about what it all means.

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The racial politics of music education

In the face of ongoing protests against police brutality in the US, I’m seeing some music educators fretting about the relevance of their work. I believe that Eurocentric music education can validate and perpetuate white supremacy, and that our responsibility is to dismantle it. Here’s an excerpt of my dissertation in progress. I hope you find it useful or thought-provoking.

Ben Shapiro - rap isn't music

Theoretical Framework: Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory (CRT) is a form of critical theory that views social and political issues through the frame of race (Crenshaw, et al., 1996). CRT is premised on two central beliefs: that race is socially constructed, and that racism is deeply and broadly enmeshed within American society. “In research, the use of CRT methodology means that the researcher foregrounds race and racism in all aspects of the research process; challenges the traditional research paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of people of color; and offers transformative solutions to racial, gender, and class subordination in our societal and institutional structures” (Creswell, 2007, p. 28). The story of American popular music is inextricable from its racial conflicts, and nowhere are these conflicts more acute than in hip-hop. Continue reading

Party like it’s 1624

In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, where it became a wildly popular dance. Over time, composers of “art” music got interested in it too, and they used it as the basis for an entire genre of increasingly abstracted compositions. By the time Bach wrote the chaconne in his Partita for Violin No. 2, he was referring to an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, something like a John Coltrane arrangement of a pop standard. It makes me wonder what a chaconne might have sounded like in its original context. Bach’s (and Coltrane’s) abstractions are wonderful in and of themselves, but you can’t fully appreciate them without understanding what they’re referring back to.

It’s easy to listen to Coltrane’s source material. If you try to do the same with for Bach, however, you have a harder time. When you do a Google search for chaconnes, you mostly find performances of Bach, or similarly abstracted works by other canonical composers. Thanks to Wikipedia, though, I did find a chaconne of the kind that a person might have actually danced to back in 17th century Spain. It’s a tune by Juan Arañés called “A La Vida Bona.” Here’s a performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band.

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Remixing Ben Shapiro

My dissertation research includes a methodology of my own invention, which I’m calling analytical remixing. I’m writing about three hip-hop educators, in order to illuminate hip-hop as an education philosophy, not just a subject area. That includes centering the remix as an important and underexplored music education practice. Beyond just writing about remixing, I am making some remixes as part of my research product. Specifically, I’m taking audio data (interviews, music, and various cultural artifacts) and remixing them to create a dissertation mixtape.

The value of the remix method is so self-evident to me that I made little effort to justify or explain it in the first draft of my dissertation proposal. However, my advisor, Alex Ruthmann, rightly pointed out that it is not self-evident to people who aren’t me. He suggestied that I pick a specific example and walk through it. So in this post, that’s what I’m going to do. It’s a remix I made of Ben Shapiro explaining why rap isn’t music.

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