AI is harmful for learning which is why I’m banning it in my classes

I put up my course web site for History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which includes an assignment due the first day of class: read about Stephen Foster and “Old Folks at Home”, listen to recordings of the song by Al Jolson and Ray Charles, and write a one paragraph response. Within 24 hours of emailing the students that the site was live, one of them had already submitted their assignment. I was excited by the quick turnaround… until I read it. The kid had obviously put the discussion question into ChatGPT and copied and pasted its output. Just to be thorough, I ran the submission through Pangram, and it said 92% AI generated, 8% AI assisted, but I could have told you that just from inspection. I have been putting a lot of effort into designing assignments that the kids won’t want to use AI to avoid doing, so this was extremely disappointing.

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My 20th Century American Pop History syllabus

See also a discussion of our kickoff song.

The course will have two components: weekly listening, reading and discussion assignments, and an ongoing public-facing writing project.

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I decided what song I’m going to start my History of 20th Century American Popular Music class with

Content warning: this post includes offensive imagery.

Way down upon the Swanee River by Dr. Ethan Hein

It’s racist down there

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One of my tasks for the next two weeks is to put together my syllabus for NYU’s new music history class on 20th century American popular music. To start the semester off, I wanted to find a song that spans many styles and eras, and that lays the thematic foundation for what comes after. I decided on “Old Folks At Home” by Stephen Foster, also known as “Swanee River.” This song was written in 1852, but it had a significant presence in the zeitgeist throughout the 20th century, and Secondhand Songs lists a couple dozen recordings from this century too. It’s Florida’s state song, because of course it is. They did replace the word “darkies” with “brothers” in 1978, though, so that’s nice. Continue reading “I decided what song I’m going to start my History of 20th Century American Popular Music class with”

My Favorite Things update

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens by Dr. Ethan Hein

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

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Last week I was at the International Society for Music Education conference, which is by a wide margin the biggest academic conference I have ever been to. I presented about teaching pop music theory and aural skills. While I was mentally gearing up for it, I came back to a song that I first encountered when we sang it in elementary school, “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

Music teachers love this tune! As I was writing this, I was listening to the Texas Tech steel drum band performing, and they started playing it, in a hip 4/4 Latin arrangement. It’s everywhere!

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Seven and Nine

I did two more podcast episodes about odd meter, about septuple and nonuple respectively, enjoy.

Seven mysteries by Dr. Ethan Hein

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Nine he gave to mortal men, proud and great, and so ensnared them by Dr. Ethan Hein

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This is going to be it for odd meters, unless there’s an unexpected groundswell in favor of 11/8.

Take Five

Even before I posted this one, I started getting suggestions for songs in 5/4, and a few in 10/4. I’m sorry if I didn’t mention your favorite, this isn’t meant to be exhaustive, it’s just some representative examples that I find interesting or personally significant.

Take Five by Dr. Ethan Hein

The meanings of quintuple meter

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Teaching Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors

I am teaching two new NYU classes this fall. One of them is History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which I wrote about recently. The other is Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors. I enjoy teaching new classes, even though they require a lot more work than teaching an existing class. The history class takes significant prep on my part, but it isn’t difficult work, because I know why people are taking the class and what we’re expected to teach them: in addition to factual information about the evolution of jazz and rock and so on, the students need to learn how to do research and how to present it in writing. By contrast, the pop analysis class should be a breeze to prep, because I have taught the subject matter a thousand times. However, it actually poses the bigger problem, because I am not as clear on what the learning goals of the class are.

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The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

The album Coltrane’s Sound begins explosively. There’s a single-note saxophone pickup, and then bang, straight into the full band playing a big, bright latin tune. A few seconds in, the feel changes to swing, then back to latin. Sometimes the chords are pedaled, floating and modal; other times they seem like regular functional circle-of-fifths changes, though those don’t last long. The name of the tune suggests a pop song, not a Coltrane composition, but it’s much too artsy and hip to be a pop song. So what is this? Other than just, awesome?

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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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