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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The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School

Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of the Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in or near 1720, performed by the guitarist Christopher Parkening.

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Aural Skills for Audio Engineers

Montclair State University asked me to develop and possibly teach a class on aural skills for audio engineers. It’s a great idea! It isn’t just audio engineers who need to know what frequencies and decibels are. These are concepts that any musician would benefit from knowing.

The internal ear

Here’s my first pass at a course outline. The main problem is that this is five semesters worth of material, so I’m sure some of it (a lot of it) will get cut. But these are the things I would want to cover in an ideal world.

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Technology Trends in Music Education

This semester, I am teaching Technology Trends in Music Education at NYU Steinhardt for the first time. The class was originally developed by my doctoral advisor, Alex Ruthmann. I took it as a masters student, and the experience was critical to the eventual development of the Groove Pizza. So you can understand why I am excited to be teaching it. My syllabus is below. I expect it to evolve a bit as the course goes on, especially toward the end of the semester as I adapt it to the needs and interests of the students. The reading list draws extensively on the same body of research and practice that informed Will Kuhn’s and my book Electronic Music School: a Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity.

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The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram:

It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths:

In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from and what they mean.

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Music Theory Songs

Ashanti Mills from my Patreon had a brilliant idea. He said, hey, you know how you combined interviews with Toni Blackman with hip-hop songs to explain hip-hop pedagogy? You should do that with music theory: have songs that explain their musical content to you. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious as soon as I hear it, but it took Ashanti suggesting it to make me realize that. So: here is my first batch!

The whole thing came together very quickly. In some cases, I took teaching materials I already developed in Noteflight, exported the MIDI, dropped it into Ableton, added beats, and went from there. In other cases, the idea existed in my head and just needed some a little trial and error to realize it.

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I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too

The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort zones.

Students have the option to write their verses from scratch, or to use existing verses as a template–Toni Blackman recommends this one and this one. They can rhyme over an existing instrumental or create their own beats, but they are not allowed to rap unaccompanied, because I don’t want them doing slam poetry. There is nothing wrong with slam poetry, but the purpose of this assignment is to experience the joy and terror of trying to ride a beat.

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Teaching songwriting to music education students

This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write songs. My method for teaching songwriting is to say, okay, go write some songs. But I don’t throw the students straight into the deep end; I start with a series of scaffolded songwriting challenges.

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Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?

Everyone’s favorite music theorist is back in the news. If you are curious about the controversy surrounding him and don’t have a music theory background, I wrote a Twitter thread for you:

However, maybe you don’t feel like wading through a long Twitter stream of consciousness, and would rather read a coherent blog post instead. Read on!

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