Teaching the history of 20th century American popular music

In the fall, I’m teaching a new music history class at NYU on 20th century American popular music. This is not a history of rock. When the department says “20th century”, they mean the entire 20th century. We don’t get to Elvis until after the midterm.

The most difficult part is going to be the beginning, because I regret to inform you that for the first several decades of the twentieth century, the most popular form of entertainment in the US was blackface minstrelry. To give you an idea of how big a deal it was, when Warner Brothers wanted to make their first feature film with sound, they needed a guaranteed box-office smash to mitigate the risk of this new and unproven technology. This is why they went with a lightly fictionalized biography of Al Jolson: evidently, nothing sold movie tickets in the 1920s more reliably than a white guy singing in blackface.

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How to learn to jam

Improvisation is the easiest and the hardest thing in music. Little kids do it effortlessly, while world-class performers and composers find it terrifying. I am a confident improvisor, but it took me a few decades to get here. Now I’m teaching classrooms full of undergrads to do it, which means coming up with more of a method than the aimless stumbling that I did. That method involves a lot of careful curation and editing of recordings. We will be listening to some of these as we go.

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More people should be listening to Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine

Most of the music I write about ranges from well known to iconic. I am not one of these people who takes pleasure in knowing about obscurities that other people don’t. However, I do have one intense fandom for a couple of guys who you are likely not to have heard of: Tim Eriksen and Peter Irvine. I took the family to see them recently in a converted church in Kingston, NY, and the music sounded like it could have come from any time in the last five thousand years, or the next five thousand. My son the Ursula Le Guin fan thinks they sound like a pair of bards from one of the more remote islands in Earthsea. I leave their shows with my senses fully activated in a way that rarely happens at my age.

When I was talking to Peter after the Kingston show, he mentioned that he and Tim have been playing music together for forty years. You can tell! In addition to their renewed touring activity, they have also released a new album, exquisitely recorded (“live and unprocessed”) by Barry Diament.

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Podcast episode on songs vs grooves

I don’t know whether this is my best podcast episode, but it is definitely my most podcast episode. It covers the Beatles, James Brown, Parliament, Michael Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Underworld, The Orb, Run-DMC, Ella Fitzgerald, Simon and Garfunkel, the Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, Sabrina Carpenter, the Temptations, Herbie Hancock, Count Basie, Eddie Harris, Miles Davis, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Frédéric Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach, and John Cage.

Songs vs Grooves by Dr. Ethan Hein

When you learn the difference, Anglo-American pop make a heck of a lot more sense

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That one weird chord in “Sir Duke”

You can feel it all over by Dr. Ethan Hein

You can feel it all over people

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We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life’s release, and I plan to put in some quality musicology on it. I’m starting now, with a look at a single chord in “Sir Duke”, the one that first appears at 0:48 in the chorus:

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Radiolab used my Mozart remix

My favorite NPR show included my remix of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 21 in their most recent episode about hookworms! It’s under the end credits. This is something I posted to Bandcamp six years ago and forgot about, but you never know what people are going to go looking for online.

Anyway, exciting day for me.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night

I have mentioned the Beatles on the podcast before, but this is the first episode entirely about one of their songs. It will probably be the first of many.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night by Dr. Ethan Hein

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

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Introducing Tuniversity

Introducing Tuniversity by Dr. Ethan Hein

and my co-founder, veteran songwriter and teacher Derek Fawcett

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My NYU colleague Derek and I are delighted to introduce you to Tuniversity, our new music learning venture. Our first songwriting course starts next month.

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The Gospel According To Aretha

Aretha Franklin’s Gospel Blues by Dr. Ethan Hein

Singing the song vs channeling the ancestors

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It’s blues melody week in theory and aural skills. That doesn’t just mean we’re looking at the blues genre, though; we’re covering all the genres that use what Richard Ripani calls “the blues system”: the characteristic pitches, harmonies, rhythms and vocal techniques that make music sound bluesy. Gospel uses the blues system extensively, and nobody sings bluesy gospel better than Aretha Franklin.

In class, we’re examining Aretha’s recording of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”, a 19th century hymn that is sung around the world in many different languages. It originated as a poem that Joseph Scriven wrote in 1855 to comfort his mother. The alliteratively-named Charles Crozat Converse set the poem to music in 1868. Fun fact about Converse: he advocated for “thon” as a gender-neutral pronoun. Continue reading “The Gospel According To Aretha”

Angine de Poitrine on MusicRadar

My most recent column for MusicRadar is an explainer on Quebec’s hottest microtonal prog-techno sensation.

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