Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed

It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:

But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:

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Clair de Lune

I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural learning through remixing. First I tried putting the MIDI in Ableton over some beats. Then I thought it would sound better to use human performances and cooler beats.

This was my toughest remix challenge yet. Adapting breakbeats to triple meter is one thing; adapting them to 9/8 time is another. I did finally discover that “The Crunge” by Led Zeppelin is also in 9/8, and after some minor editing, the opening drum break fit in just fine. I also used jazz drumming sampled from McCoy Tyner and Adam Makowicz. I used aggressive low-pass filtering to keep the beats from overwhelming the delicate piano, and I beefed up the piano part via compression as well.

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Perpetual motion in Bach’s E major Violin Partita Prelude

In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, 2, 134 and 135, Bach’s prelude is an unbroken string of sixteenth notes. This kind of composition became a genre unto itself for 19th century composers. However, when Paganini does it, I mostly just find it exhausting. Bach uses unpredictable phrasing and emphasis, so even when his note values are all uniform, his rhythms still feel syncopated and fresh.

My favorite recording of the prelude is by Viktoria Mullova. Her straightforward exactness suits this music better than the sloppy exuberance of more famous virtuosos like Itzhak Perlman.

I hear Bach’s complex rhythmic phrasing better when the tempo is steady and there are some beats underneath, so I made this remix.

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Let’s listen to some extremely slowed down Bach

In this stressful time, we all need some help attaining inner peace. I’ve been enjoying listening to and thinking about the prelude to Bach’s Violin Partita Number 3 in E major as played by Hopkinson Smith.

Beautiful though this is, it’s also a lot of information packed into a small space. I thought it might be more relaxing if it was slower. And that it might be a lot more relaxing if it was a lot slower. So I used Ableton Live to stretch it out as slow as I possibly could.

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Syncopation in Chopin

I’m trying to get better at understanding classical music, ideally without doing too much Schenkerian analysis. I can hunt for cadences as well as anyone who’s been to music school, and I understand how important they are as structural elements in the Western canon. But there’s more to this music than harmony. It has rhythm too, and I’m curious to know who’s studying that aspect. While digging through Google Scholar results, I found John Rink’s rhythmic analysis of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 No 3. This is the one where Chopin starts with one of his loveliest, most achingly wistful melodies, and then inexplicably launches into Cloud Cuckooland. Here’s a recording by Maurizio Pollini.

I was unsurprised to learn from Wikipedia that the main melody has been repurposed for many pop songs over the past 150 years, though they tend not to use the crazy part. An example:

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Learning minor key harmony from the Bach Chaconne

Major keys are easy to understand, at least in classical music, because a major key and a major scale are coextensive. Minor keys are harder, because you can’t just equate them to particular minor scales. To understand how chords work in minor keys, I’m going to walk you through a standard progression that happens throughout the final movement of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor, the famous Chaconne.

Here’s the complete performance by Viktoria Mullova, with MIDI visualization in Ableton Live created by me:

Read more about the Chaconne and hear the Afro-Funk remix. There’s a lot there to dig into! But right now, I’m just going to talk about the first few measures. The opening phrase is four chords: Dm, Eø7 with its 7th in the bass, A7 with its 3rd in the bass, and Dm again.

Together, the chords form a ii-V-i in D minor. In the remainder of this post, I’m going to talk through these three chords and their associated scales in detail. Try them for yourself on the aQWERTYon.

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Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 – Prelude

I’m teaching melody in music theory class this month, and nobody wrote better melodies than Bach. If you want to learn how to use single note lines to imply chord changes and counterpoint, the prelude to his first cello suite is a whole textbook worth of wisdom for you. My favorite interpretation is by Mstislav Rostropovich.

Music supervisors in movies and television have run this prelude into the ground, as evidenced by Bach’s colossal IMDB page. Noteworthy usages include The Pianist, The West Wing, Netflix’s Daredevil, If I Stay, The Hangover Part II, and, uh, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. My personal favorite is in Master and Commander, when they arrive in the Galapagos Islands.

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Announcing the Theory aQWERTYon

A few years ago, the NYU Music Experience Design Lab launched a web application called the aQWERTYon. The name is short for “QWERTY accordion.” The idea is to make it as easy to play music on the computer keyboard as it is with the chord buttons on an accordion. The aQWERTYon maps scales to the keyboard so that there are no “wrong notes,” and so that each column of keys plays a chord. Yesterday, we launched a new version of the app, the Theory aQWERTYon. It visualizes the notes you’re playing on the chromatic circle in real time. Click the image to try it! (Be sure to whitelist it on your ad blocker or it won’t work.)

Theory aQWERTYon

In addition to playing the built-in instruments, you can also use the aQWERTYon as a MIDI controller for any DAW or notation program. Just set the input to the IAC bus (Windows users will need to install MidiOX before this will work.)

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