Identifying blues melodies

This is an exciting week of class for me, because we are analyzing blues melodies, and that is a music-theoretic subject that is close to my heart. Given its impact on the past hundred years of Anglo-American popular culture, the blues has been the subject of a shockingly small amount of musicological analysis. The best resource I know of is Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis by Jeff Titon. I collect lots of other references of widely varying quality here. It’s wonderful that NYU is centering the blues in its new pop theory sequence, but how do we actually teach it? Western tonal theory is no help here, and jazz theory doesn’t have much to add. If there isn’t a systematic framework we can use, where do we even begin?

The first question we have to answer is, what constitutes a blues melody? Are we only going to count Delta blues, or other kinds of blues, or are we going to open up our inquiry to blues-derived musics like jazz, country, R&B or rock? I think we can draw on any kind of music that uses blues tonality, so my answer is all of the above, but that does not make my job any easier.

Continue reading

Identifying plagal cadences

This week in aural skills, we’re working on various harmonic tropes based on IV-I root movements. This chord progression is technically called the plagal cadence, but is more memorably nicknamed the “Amen” cadence because it’s a traditional European hymn ending. (It has nothing to do with the Amen break, though they do sound good together.) The plagal cadence is the mirror image of the classical V-I authentic cadence.

Where does the word “plagal” come from? The Online Etymology Dictionary says that it’s probably from Greek plagios, meaning “oblique” or “side”, and that word in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *plak-, “to be flat”. This root also gives us flag (a flat stone for paving), flake, and plank. Plagal probably shares an etymology with “flatness” because the important voice-leading element is scale degree four resolving down to three. While we’re talking about word origins, amen comes from a Hebrew word meaning “truth,” in this context meaning “an adverbial expression of agreement.” Continue reading

Rap before hip-hop

For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap when you sing rhythmically on one pitch, or on a narrow range of pitches? Rap more often uses wider pitch contours. Are we counting any spoken word with musical accompaniment, or does the speaking have to be rhythmically structured in a specific way? Does it have to rhyme? We will be discussing all that in class.

Blues

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” (1948)

Hooker raps a couple of short verses amid a mostly sung tune, and they are haunting. He is not exactly following the rhythm of the guitar part, but he’s also not using natural speech rhythm; it’s somewhere in between.

Continue reading

Blues harmony primer

For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise.

How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes does it include? What are blue notes? Why does it sound good to play minor melody notes over major chords? To answer these questions, I combine my experiences of listening to and playing the music, talking to practitioners, and reading academic sources.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Groove harmony

See also a study of groove melody

Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. This idea aligns with my experience of listening to and making groove-based music. I’d like to develop it further, to form a general theory of how groove harmony works.

I don’t plan to try to explain every kind of groove there is, but I do want to look for widely recurring patterns. My main goal is to save my students the many years of trial and error that it took me to figure out this vast and understudied area of musical practice.

Disclaimers: this isn’t any kind of complete theory, it’s me thinking out loud about a bunch of examples. I chose those examples because I like them and find them interesting, not because I’m trying to be systematic.

Continue reading

Songs vs Grooves

Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves.Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove.

In structural terms, a groove is a small musical cell that repeats indefinitely. A song is a hierarchical organization of smaller cells that form a linear sequence with a beginning, middle and end. The lack of large-scale structure in a groove makes it effortlessly malleable and extensible. Want to make it thirty seconds longer? No problem. Want to make it thirty minutes longer? No problem. Songs are not so flexible. If you wanted to make “Yesterday” longer, would you… make up more verses? Repeat the bridge again?

Continue reading

Music for practicing scales

Are you trying to learn how to improvise with scales and patterns, but finding it hard to make yourself practice? Do yourself a favor, and practice over actual music. A student asked me to make him a playlist of harmonically static music that’s good for practicing over. I thought I would share it with everyone.

The music in this post is perfect for working out scales. Each track stays in a particular key or mode for long stretches of time, and has a slow or medium tempo. You can dig deep into the scales associated with each one without needing to worry about form or rapid chord changes. Click the links to load the aQWERTYon set to the appropriate key and scale.

The Temptations

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – B-flat Dorian or blues

Miles Davis

Shhh Peaceful” – D Mixolydian (or blues, or major, or really anything)
In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” – slow part is E major (or Lydian, or blues), funky part is F Mixolydian (or blues, or Dorian)

“He Loved Him Madly” – C Phrygian (or blues, or natural minor, or any minor scale)


Continue reading

Prepping my rap and rock class at Montclair State

This summer, I’m teaching Cultural Significance of Rap and Rock at Montclair State University. It’s my first time teaching it, and it’s also the first time anyone has taught it completely online. The course is cross-listed under music and African-American studies. Here’s a draft of my syllabus, omitting details of the grading and such. I welcome your questions, comments and criticism.

Rap and Rock

Continue reading