My year in writing

I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book aimed at music teachers. That’s percolating in the background.

I also finished a book chapter about critical race theory in music education with Frank Abrahams. We started it quite a while ago, before CRT was a regular topic on Fox News and before conservative states started banned its teaching. We were still editing about a week before it went to the printers.

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Things I wrote this year

I wrote a tremendous amount this year, due to a combination of pandemic-induced academic underemployment and pandemic-induced confinement to quarters. The big headlines are that I published a book with Will Kuhn, and completed a draft of my doctoral dissertation. The book we really wrote in prior years and just did the final revisions and copyedits this year, but even the end stage of the editorial process was an epic journey unto itself. The dissertation has been coming together even longer than that, and I hope to defend it in the next month or two.

Related to the above, I also wrote a syllabus for teaching songwriting to music education majors, and a rap verse.

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What is Hip-Hop Education, the remix

In my first official interview with each of my three dissertation research participants, I asked them to answer the question, “What is hip-hop education?” To analyze their responses, I edited their answers down to their most salient moments and remix them by laying them over related music. The next step was to compare the remixed responses to see what resonances and conflicts emerged.

I exported the “acapellas” from each first-round remix and edited them down to what I consider to be their most crucial segments. Then I organized the sequences into a kind of “cypher,” where the three participants virtually pass the mic. I put all this over the instrumental from “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” by Pete Rock and CL Smooth, not for any special thematic reason, but because I consider it to be an exceptionally powerful and meaningful song.

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Toni Blackman 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 Toni Blackman that I recorded on August 20, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix is made from the eighteen most interesting/pertinent/relevant minutes of an hour and a quarter worth of audio.


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Will Kuhn and I finished our book

For the past year or so, Will Kuhn and I have been writing a book for Oxford University Press called Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Late last night, we submitted the finished manuscript to Oxford. There are still multiple rounds of copyedits and page proofs to do before it hits the shelves, but the hard part is over.

SpongeBob writes

The book is for music educators who want to develop classes in music technology, production, beatmaking, songwriting, or film scoring. It includes a full curriculum’s worth of project plans that Will created for his wildly successful music tech program at Lebanon High School in Ohio. We also talk about methods for developing your own projects, keeping your material current, purchasing and maintaining gear, budgeting and fundraising, selling the idea to your school, teaching music tech online, and the radically progressive educational philosophy animating our work. I’ll keep you posted about the release date.

Sound writing with my New School students

I just completed the first week of Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. We began the semester with critical listening. Before having the students analyze recorded music, I had them warm up by doing some writing about the sound of a mundane environment. As it turns out, New School students are terrific and imaginative writers, and I thought I would share some excerpts of their work here.

The internal ear

The assignment: Choose a physical location, and describe its soundscape in 500-1000 words. List all of the sound sources you can and describe them in as much detail as possible. Describe your emotional reactions to these sounds individually and collectively. If you like, review the sounds as if they are a musical work.

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Rob Walker on The Art of Noticing

Rob Walker has a new book out. I’m in it! You should buy and read it.

Rob Walker - The Art of Noticing

Rob interviewed me about critical listening, that is, listening closely to music to try to mentally isolate the different instruments/sounds, and understand their relationships to each other, and to the whole. Critical listening can reveal whole new dimensions to a song, even if it’s one that you’ve heard a thousand times. The entire book is devoted to similar methods for seeing or thinking about familiar things in new ways. It’s a combination meditation guide and practical arts method resource. It’s lovingly written and beautifully designed, and I’m super proud to be a part of it.