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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Check out these grooves that I have my aural skills students improvise over

If you major in music at most universities, you have to take several semesters of aural skills classes. These classes traditionally consist of two main activities: sight-singing and dictation, that is, hearing a melody or chord sequence a few times and then writing it out in notation. Aural skills class was the definite low point of my grad school education, and it helped deter me from studying music as an undergrad. I find sight-singing and dictation to be intensely stressful, because I’m terrible at them and because I have never had to do them in real musical life.

NYU’s new pop music theory sequence has its own aural skills classes, and I am pleasantly surprised to find myself teaching them. I can do it because these classes are very different from the ones that I took. Some of that is the repertoire: Stevie Wonder rather than Beethoven. The structure of the class is different too. The music we’re studying exists as recordings, not notated scores. It was substantially created by ear, and is substantially learned that way. So while we do work on notation-related skills, it can’t be the only thing on the menu. (Most of my students are better readers than I am anyway!) My job is to create classroom activities and assignments that are appropriate to pop music and its learning methods.

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A unified theory of rock harmony in one sentence

All the chords you need for rock by Dr. Ethan Hein

can be found using a simple formula

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When I was learning guitar, I did a lot of studying and memorizing chord progressions. I did even more thinking about chords when I was learning to play jazz. When I shifted over to mainly producing electronic music, all my focus went to thinking about groove and timbre and I stopped thinking about chords completely. But now that I’m teaching music theory, I’m back to thinking about chords, and as I prep examples for class, I am in particular thinking about chords in rock songs in a serious way for the first time since my 20s.

You can’t generalize about chord progressions in Anglo-American pop across the board, because there’s too much stylistic diversity between metal, country, hip-hop, R&B, dance music and so on. However, rock has stabilized into a canon, and it’s possible to get your arms around the entire thing.

So given all that, here’s my explanation of rock harmony in one sentence: put major chords on the notes in the natural minor scale, and put minor chords on the notes in the major scale. That doesn’t explain every chord you’ll find in a rock song, but it does explain a lot of them.

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