Adam Neely video on rap covers

I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See the result here:

Seeing Adam’s process from the inside gives me great respect for his skills as an editor. He had a list of questions for the interview, but it was free-flowing and jumped around on many tangents. The tight and logical sequence of ideas you see above is the result of postproduction. 

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Online music teaching resources

This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health.

Big collections:

A spreadsheet of online music theory resources and projects, plus my New School syllabus that uses many of these things.

A spreadsheet of online music technology resources and projects.

The NYSSMA Best Practices Database.

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Ignorant Populists

Build A Fort is the drums/saxophone duo of  Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir, two of the leading lights in progressive music education. The title of their new album, Ignorant Populists, is presumably a play on their role in advancing popular music pedagogy. The album was mostly recorded while Gareth was in New York and Zack was in Edinburgh, but that is no big obstacle in the age of the internet.

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NYU Music Education Technology Practicum syllabus

This week I begin another iteration of my NYU class, a music technology crash course for future music teachers. Given the vastness of the subject matter and the constraints of a one-semester course, the challenge is always to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. I continue to take a project-based approach, where students produce an original track for each module. I don’t expect students to absorb all the details of the technical material around audio recording and such, I am mostly just giving them things to bookmark for future use. We do a recording studio project that isn’t listed here because it’s all hands-on during class time. If you want to use this syllabus for something, please do, and please let me know!


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Talking whiteness on the So Strangely podcast

Fellow NYU doctoral student and possessor of fabulous blue hair Finn Upham hosts a podcast called So Strangely that interviews music science researchers. (The podcast is named for the sublimely weird speech-to-song illusion.) Finn recently interviewed Juliet Hess, who is fearlessly examining the whiteness of university-level music education, and invited me along for additional music education background. Listen by clicking the image:

So Strangely Podcast

Ableton Loop 2018

I’m recently home from Ableton’s stupendous “summit for music makers,” and I’m still mentally unpacking it all.

Ableton Loop posters

Loop was quite a different experience from last year, when Ableton held it in their home city of Berlin. This year, they moved it to Los Angeles to make it easier for people in Latin America and the Pacific to get there. Rather than the dark and cold of November in Germany, we got to enjoy Southern California’s high seventies (and raging forest fires, so, a tradeoff.) In Berlin, the conference was all held in one big building, the Funkhaus recording studio complex. In LA, it was spread across several smaller venues, including the Ricardo Montalbán Theater with its beach-like roof deck, and the legendary EastWest Studios.

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Teaching whiteness in music class

Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem.

Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post.

Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music teaches the competencies of European-descended classical music: performing acoustic instruments in ensembles, reading notation, and following a conductor. Youth culture, meanwhile, values recorded music descending from the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora, substantially produced using computers. Hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and by some measures, in the world (Hooton, 2015). Yet it is vanishingly unusual for hip-hop to be addressed in an American music classroom. Even when educators want to do so, they rarely have the necessary experience or knowledge. Meanwhile, musicians with a hip-hop background find their skills and knowledge to be of little value to institutional gatekeepers. Kendrick Lamar is a good enough musician to merit a Pulitzer Prize, but he would not be accepted into most undergraduate music education programs (Kruse, 2018).

Biz

Why is it so important that music education embrace hip-hop when students are already immersed in it outside of school? There are three main reasons. First, if music educators wish to foster students’ own musical creativity, then students must be free to create in the styles that are meaningful to them. Second, while many young people enjoy listening to hip-hop, few know how to produce it. Third, and most important, music is a site where social and political values are contested, symbolically or directly. The Eurocentrism of school music sends a clear message about whose cultural expression we value. While the white mainstream loves hip-hop, America showers the people who created it with contempt (Perry, 2004, p. 27), and sometimes violence. By affording Afrodiasporic musics the respect they deserve, we will teach students to similarly value the creators of those musics.  Continue reading

Big thoughts on music tech

A student interviewed me for a class project on “the impact of music technology on the music industry.” Her questions and my answers follow.

How did you get interested in music technology?

I got interested in music technology the first time I touched an instrument. So did you! I don’t think we should even have a subject called “music technology”, because it properly includes every aspect of music other than unaccompanied singing. Saxophones and pianos are no more “natural” or non-technological than computers. For that reason, I don’t do much teaching about technology in class; I teach the creative processes of music production, specifically, recorded music of the African diasporic vernacular tradition, what the music academy calls “popular.” I talk about that because other college courses don’t, and I think it’s important for music educators to know how to make the music that their students like. I have the freedom to do that because there is no standard way to teach music tech – when I was hired, I was told to pretty much do whatever I saw fit.

Bouncy Synth - Ableton Arrange View

I got interested in recording technology when I first tried recording myself with a tape recorder at age six. I got interested in learning how to do it well when I was in college, and my folk band went into a studio. We spent a bunch of money and got back a result that was so-so. It became clear that my money would be better spent on a computer, an interface, some software and a couple of microphones. This was in the late 90s, when the price of all of those things was falling dramatically, and it was becoming possible to get professional-sounding results in your apartment without spending tens of thousands of dollars. At first I was only interested in recording voices and live instruments. I started programming drums, samples, and synth parts as placeholders for “real” instruments. But then I got interested in making those sound better, because so much of the music I like uses synths and samples. The world helped push me in that direction, since there’s a lot more demand for producers than for guitarists. Continue reading

Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the status of jazz in the music academy

On October 25, 1932, Percy Grainger invited Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform “Creole Love Call” as part of a music lecture at New York University. It was the first time any university had invited a jazz musician to perform in an academic context. I will argue that the meeting of Grainger and Ellington is a prism refracting the broader story of the music academy’s slow and reluctant embrace of jazz. This story is, in turn, a cultural reflection of the broader African-American freedom struggle.

Percy Grainger and Duke Ellington, 1935

Ellington has come to embody the cultural prestige now enjoyed by jazz. He appears on Washington DC’s state quarter, and his statue stands at the northeast corner of Central Park in New York City. In 1932, however, Ellington was known to official music culture only as the leader of a popular dance band and the writer of a few catchy tunes. Although he was already a celebrity, few white people outside of jazz fandom considered Ellington to be a serious artist. That year, he received his first favorable review from a classical critic, followed by endorsements from Percy Grainger and a few other figures from the music establishment. This praise was unusual at the time. Most cultural authorities of the era held jazz in low regard, assigning the same value that hip-hop holds in academic circles today: undeniably popular, vibrant perhaps, but deficient in musical quality, and even, according to some critics, a threat to the nation’s morals.

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