Lonely Woman but it’s Gregorian chant

This morning I saw this tweet:

I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I dragged them onto other tracks.

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Two hundred Disquiet Junto submissions

Since January 2012, I have created over two hundred (!) pieces of music for the Disquiet Junto. That represents thirteen hours of recordings, which is more music than I have produced for every other creative undertaking in my life combined. In honor of this milestone, I’ve compiled my best submissions on Bandcamp.

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Blogging about blogging

I started posting writing online long before I had any academic ambitions. I wrote for self-promotion, self-expression, and because I wasn’t sure what else to do with myself. I did a lot of what I would now call a reflexive and reciprocal process for research into music and related topics. As it turns out, this was a good habit to have when I went to grad school. I have posted most of my masters and doctoral level writing assignments, notes, papers, and research materials on the web. In the process, I have met an incredible lot of people who I would not have met otherwise.

XKCD on blogging

For a while I was only posting about innocuous music and technology-related topics: theory, production, general appreciation. But as I go deeper into the intersection of music education and hip-hop, my posts have been getting more political. This material attracts supporters and allies, which is gratifying, but also heated criticism, and, since the dawn of the Trump era, a growing volume of hate speech. The constructive feedback comes in the form of affirmation, social contacts, corrections, arguments, tips, and directions for further inquiry. Some of these interactions are direct, in the form of comments or replies on social media, but I also get plenty of indirect feedback via my Google alerts. Research and writing are lonely undertakings, and feeling myself connected to a lively conversation at all times has been an invaluable motivator.

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My adventures among the alt-right

In my last semester of doctoral coursework at NYU, I took a class called Research On Urban And Minority Education, taught by Alex Freidus. For my final paper, I wrote about the racial politics of music education. I had written versions of this paper for other courses, but Alex supplied some key concepts and vocabulary I had been missing, and I felt like this was the first time I had really been able to get my arms around my core idea: that school music is a site where white privilege is reproduced. On May 8, I posted the paper on this blog, as I have with all of my grad school writing assignments. I got some gratifying rah-rah responses from other progressive music educators, with more Facebook and Twitter shares than usual, and that felt good.

I also got one strange comment:

The most interesting thing about this article is that it requires the reader to be familiar (and in agreement) with a very specific ideology (postmodernist relativism) in order to be understood according to the author’s intentions. To a normal educated person, the content of this article reads as shockingly racist, and deeply morally confused. In order for it to sound somewhat palatable, and not like the incredibly racist screed that it is, the author has had to torturously render the entire thing using a strict postmodernist vocabulary.

I’m used to cultural conservatives calling me racist for talking about racism. But I wasn’t sure why this guy was harping on the word “postmodernist.” It’s an accurate description of my scholarly approach, but it also describes every other mainstream academic in the world. It would be like disparaging me by calling me an American. This is before I found out that “postmodernism” is a Jordan Peterson buzzword.

Then, a couple of weeks later, the real excitement began.

Make Music Ed Great Again
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Junto trios

In the past three weeks, thanks to the magic of the Disquiet Junto, I’ve participated in the creation of three musical trios with six strangers from the internet. Here’s a family tree of the nine tracks we all did:

Junto trios

Artist names are in black, “part one” tracks are in blue, “part two” tracks are in red, and “part three” tracks are in green. We followed Marc Weidenbaum’s prompts for part one, part two, and part three. Hear all the music we all made below.

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More remixes of my Disquiet Junto remix

The same Disquiet Junto project that spawned this wildly recursive remix also involved a few more people remixing my remix. Here’s a family tree of the three first generation source tracks, the seven second generation remixes of those tracks, and the three third generation remixes of the second generation remixes.

Junto metaremix flowchart

You can hear the three third-generation metaremixes below.

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Recursive remixes

Here’s a strange and interesting thing that happened to me. The assignment for Disquiet Junto project 233 was to remix three tracks. The assignment for Junto project 234 was to metaremix one of the remixes from project 233. One of the people whose remix I metaremixed was listening to my track and accidentally had it playing in two different browser tabs simultaneously. He liked how it sounded, so he did a metametaremix with two copies of my metaremix offset by a few beats. It came out amazing!

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Goodbye SoundCloud?

I love SoundCloud. I love it for being an exceptionally easy way to share my music with people all over the world. I love the community aspect, especially the Disquiet Junto. I have all of my students host their portfolios there. But like a lot of the electronic musicians who form the heart of the SoundCloud userbase, I’m running into some problems with copyright.

Recently, I needed to unwind from a stressful morning, so I fired up Ableton, put in some Super Mario Bros mp3s and James Brown breaks, and went to town. I uploaded the results to my SoundCloud page, as usual, but got one of their increasingly frequent copyright notices.

SoundCloud copyright notice

I’ve uploaded a lot of material to SoundCloud that violates copyright law in various ways, and for the most part, no one has made any objection. I’ve occasionally used some long intact samples that triggered takedown notices, but my remixes and mashups are usually transformative enough to slip through the filter. Lately, however, I’m finding that SoundCloud has dramatically stepped up its copyright enforcement. A few months ago, I could have posted my Super Mario Bros/James Brown mashup without any trouble. Not any more.

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