Monday, February 20, 2012
Thompson, Tok. Beatboxing, Mashups, and Cyborg Identity: Folk Music for the Twenty-First Century. Western Folklore, Spring 2011, 71-193. Thompson’s provocative thesis is that folk music of the present is either produced entirely digitally, or is performed with the specific intent of imitating electronic sounds. Furthermore, the oral tradition intrinsic to folk music is now substantially [...]
Thursday, November 3, 2011
I know this melody as the cartoon snakecharmer song. Here’s a kid playing it on bass clarinet: I’ve always wondered where the Egyptian melody came from. It turns out to be hundreds of years of old, and goes by many different names. You can find an excellent capsule history of it in William Benzon’s book [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Evolution, Music
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Also tagged beatles, cartoons, cliches, das racist, jazz, linkedin, louis armstrong, memes, middle eastern music, pop, quora, stereotyping, steve martin, they might be giants
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Why does folk music collector Alan Lomax have a copyright interest in “Takeover” by Jay-Z? I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Music Business, Politics, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged alan lomax, blues, chain gangs, copyright, digging the crates, funk, grand funk railroad, hip-hop, jay-z, krs-one, rock, Sampling, the animals
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I have a new harmonica student starting today, so while I gather materials for him, I figured I’d put them in a blog post too. I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, bob dylan, deford bailey, grateful dead, harmonica, howard levy, jazz, little walter jacobs, major scale, mixolydian, Music Theory, sonny terry, stevie wonder, toots thielemans
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Since it was Easter yesterday, Anna wanted to listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion while we pottered around the house. A certain passage grabbed my ear, a hymn called “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” — in English, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.” This beautiful tune was immediately familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite [...]
Filed in Composition, Copyright and Authorship, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged bach, classical, easter, genealogy, hymns, memes, Music, paul simon
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
The C major scale is the foundation that the rest of western music theory sits on. If you master it, you get a bunch of cool chords and scales for free, along with a window into a huge swath of our musical culture. How to form the scale Imagine an ice cube tray with twelve [...]
Filed in Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged beethoven, bjork, chords, classical, guitar, harmony, leonard cohen, major scale, mozart, Music, Music Theory
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Most beginner guitarists start by learning the same fifteen chords, usually called the “standard fifteen.” I’ve also heard them called the open chords because they make use of open strings and are thus easy to play. For fingerings, have a look at wikipedia or any book on beginner guitar. You can also see this handy [...]
Sample-based music isn’t stealing. It’s valuable and important. It shows the way toward a future for recorded music that’s more in continuity with music’s past. Recordings are cool and everything, but they encourage passivity. If I buy a recording, I can listen to it or dance to it, both fine activities, but what if I [...]
Filed in Copyright and Authorship, Music, Politics, Sampling, Software
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Also tagged amazing grace, blues, copyright, google, Improvisation, Internet, jazz, kanye west, learning, memes, Music, Music Theory, opensource, remixes, Sampling, transcribing
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