This year I did a lot of rewriting and refining things I had previously written: for my classes, for MusicRadar columns, and for this web site here. I started a podcast, too. Recording and editing it is a lot of work, but it is extremely satisfying creatively and I’m hoping it will find its audience. Here are some of the episodes that I think came out the best:
- Why are F-sharp and G-flat two different notes?
- Watermelon Man
- The name of this tune is the Funky Drummer
- It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing
- You Are My Sunshine
I taught a new aural skills class at NYU, Advanced Popular Music Transcription. Here’s how it went. I also continued teaching other pop theory and aural skills classes. There was a lot of overlap between things we talked about in class and things I wrote about here and talked about on the podcast.
Related to those classes, the most substantial thing I wrote this year has not yet seen the light of day. It’s a proposal for a pop ear training textbook that I’m co-writing with my NYU colleague Samantha Bassler, which we hope to get published by Oxford University Press. The editor we’re working with sent the proposal out for peer review, and the reactions were mixed, so now we’re figuring out how to make a stronger case for what we’re trying to do. Our editor assures us that multiple rounds of reviews for book proposals is normal, but it’s still stressful.
I taught a graduate seminar on technology in music education, and we spent a lot of time talking about AI. I am finding value in specific AI utilities like stem separation and de-noising recordings, but I think that generative AI is harmful for creativity. I also think that AI slop predates AI. These posts got a lot of reaction and I am happy to be joining the chorus of AI skeptics in education.
There’s also a thing that I am extremely excited about and that no one else has shown the slightest interest in, which are songs I’ve been writing to explain music theory concepts using those concepts in the songs. I’m exaggerating, I have tried these out with my students and they react positively, and it’s certainly more engaging to sing these things than to just look at symbols on the page. I want to publish these somewhere but have no idea who might be interested. So they just live online for now.
- A song about chromatic embellishments
- A song about suspensions
- A song about embellishing tones
- A song about end-accented phrases
Finally, here are some miscellaneous posts that I thought were especially good:
- Harmonic rhythm in two-chord shuttles
- Electric and electronic instruments of 20th century pop
- Thelonious Monk plays the blues
- Visualizing secondary dominants
- Inside the Super MAGFest Jam Clinic
This year, I’m going to keep teaching theory and aural skills, and am hoping to start teaching some pop history too. If all goes as planned, Sam and I will get our book contract and then get busy writing. Maybe I’ll find a way out of adjunct hell, though I don’t know how that will come to pass. I hope to keep teaching college forever, I love doing it more than anything, but it would be nice to be doing it alongside a more stable kind of work.