Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester

I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes on pop and non-Western music. This change was driven by the chair, Sarah Louden, who put a heroic amount of work into it. It meant that I was suddenly qualified to teach music theory. At the same time, the music ed program entered a crisis that it hasn’t yet recovered from, so now I’m finding myself mostly teaching theory and aural skills.

I have taught theory before and am confident about it, but I had some imposter syndrome going into aural skills teaching because I had a terrible time with those classes myself and am generally not a strong music reader. However, the pop classes are more about aural analysis of recordings and improvisation, and those are areas where I am rock solid. I even started working on a pop aural skills textbook with my colleague Samantha Bassler, and our proposal is currently working its way through the review process, so, fingers crossed.

This semester, I’ve been teaching my first advanced class, Aural Skills III: Advanced Popular Music Transcription. The class was created by fellow pop scholar Kevin Laskey. I have been using the broad strokes of his approach and some of his assignments, while shifting the repertoire more toward my own areas of expertise and interest.

Here’s how the structure works. Each week, the students do a transcription project. Most of those involve traditional Western notation, but some of them use alternative methods of analysis and visualization. During class time, we talk through examples of the style, genre or analysis technique in question. These discussions frequently lead off into related areas: technology, the music business, broader cultural politics, and meta-level ideas about pedagogy. This last topic is important to me. Studying pop music in a formal setting is a new idea, and we are very much all figuring out how to do it in real time. So I like involving the students in thinking about why we’re doing what we’re doing and whether it’s effective. They don’t always know, but they frequently have useful feedback that I wouldn’t want to wait to read in the class evaluations.

Here are the projects we have done so far.

Musical Space and Structure Graph

Choose a recording with at least four distinct musical and/or vocal layers and create a musical structure graph. List each song section with its start time and length in measures. For each section, list each audible vocal part, instrumental track, or other sonic element. Describe the sound and timbre of each layer as specifically as possible, including any audible processing and effects. Also describe its location in perceived musical space (far/near, left/right.) You can do this as a text document, a spreadsheet, or whatever other format makes sense.

Most students did this in word processors, but some made elegant color-coded spreadsheets, and a couple created annotated DAW sessions.

David Bowie Lead Sheet

Imagine that you are Gus Dudgeon, and you are preparing to produce David Bowie’s new song, “Space Oddity.” You must create a lead sheet for the session guitarist and bassist. On one sheet of letter-sized paper, show the form, chords, essential rhythms, and any other relevant performance instructions.

I was expecting a bunch of mostly identical chord charts, but some folks went above and beyond, and included basslines, strumming patterns, and general notes about vibe. It’s definitely a challenge to fit this information onto one page! We talked about the pros and cons of using repeats and jumps versus just listing every measure of the tune, and what information is essential to put on the page. We also had a guest lecture by Tom Zlabinger, who talked about the lead sheet format he uses with his student ensembles when they learn rock and pop songs. He modified the basic Ultimate Guitar format to show harmonic rhythm by aligning chords and lyrics visually on the page, which is an excellent idea.

Watermelon Men

Notate the heads (main melodies) to the following versions of “Watermelon Man”:

• Herbie Hancock (1962)
• Mongo Santamaría
• Pancho Sanchez
• Johnny Taylor (just the sung parts, don’t worry about the spoken lines)
• Herbie Hancock (1973) (start at 2:30)
• Optional challenge: Lionel Loueke

I am only interested in the top-line melody, the part that you would hum or whistle. If you want to include harmony parts, chord symbols etc, that is fine, but not required. Be as specific as you can with the rhythms.

The big question here was how to show microrhythm, especially in the two Latin versions, and in the R&B version by Johnny Taylor. Some used simple rhythms and then wrote “dragged” and so forth, while others used complex tuplets and small subdivisions. We talked about the tradeoff between specificity and readability, and also explored Herbie Hancock’s stylistic evolution.

Aretha Franklin Vocal

Choose a vocal performance by Aretha Franklin and transcribe at least eight measures of it into notation. Include lyrics. Be as detailed and specific as you can. As you do this, consider which aspects of the performance can and cannot be accurately captured in notation. Please be sure to tell me not just the name of the song, but a timestamp for the part that you transcribed. Also, I have published a couple of transcriptions of Aretha; you can transcribe the same songs if you want, just don’t do the same verses I did!

Once again, this project was a challenge in deciding how much detail and specificity to put in about the complex rhythms. There was also the question of you represent bends, slides and blue notes in Western notation. In class, we identified some characteristic Aretha-isms, and tried to verbalize why she is so wonderful. Yes, there’s an element of soul and feeling that you can’t put into words, but there are also specific musical techniques and ideas that you can talk about.

Presenting Musical Analysis

For this assignment, you will be considering different formats for presenting musical analysis. Choose one example of each of the following: a fully notated score, a lead sheet, a written essay or article, an audio podcast, and a YouTube video. Submit PDFs or links so I can see what you are talking about. Briefly describe the strengths and weaknesses of each analysis format. What information can each one effectively communicate, and what can it not communicate? Which audience of music learners would get the most out of each format?

A few ambitious souls found analyses of the same song in every different format, that was impressive. Some students took the assignment to mean that they should discuss the pros and cons of a specific video or podcast or article, rather than talking about videos or podcasts or articles generally, which is fair enough. It is helpful to determine which aspects of, say, YouTube theory explainers are intrinsic to the medium and which are just conventions set by the most popular people.

Midterm Presentations

You will present a brief (five minute) analysis of the song of your choice. This can include notated transcriptions of key sections, motifs or ideas; a discussion of the recording’s sound and space; description of crucial production techniques used; and analysis of how those techniques combine with the rhythms, pitches and lyrics to create musical meaning. You may present this information in class, as a video, or as an audio podcast. Please stick to the musical content of the song; keep discussion of the artists’ personalities and backstories to a minimum.

The previous assignment set people up to present their own analyses. Several people have been presenting their own original music, which is great! I have been letting people blow past the five-minute limit because it’s so interesting to see them walk through their 200-track Logic sessions. We might end up spending a couple of weeks on this, which is fine with me, I think everyone is learning a lot.

In the second half of the semester, we will be talking about syncopation in the context of a Willie Nelson song, microtiming in the context of J Dilla, and the challenge of notating rap flows. The last few projects will involve audio production: recreating an existing pop instrumental, and then creating new instrumentals for some acapella vocals. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.