The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music …
Author Archives: Ethan
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.
Don’t Sweat the Technique
I did not expect to hear a classic Eric B & Rakim track on The Crown, but at the end of season five, episode five, there was Dominic West as Prince Charles, dancing to this: There is a lot going on here! The track opens with an upright bass and a drum kit playing a …
The Song Factory course
I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose …
My year in writing
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book …
New book chapter on critical race theory in music education
I’m proud to announce the publication of A Music Pedagogy for Our Time: Conversation and Critique, edited by Frank Abrahams. Frank and I co-authored a chapter on critical race theory in music education. Check it out!
Just intonation harmonicas
A commenter on the last post informed me of a remarkable fact: for most of the twentieth century, Hohner harmonicas were tuned in just intonation, not twelve-tone equal temperament. This is surprising! Just about every fixed-pitch instrument in the Western world is tuned in 12-TET unless it’s highly specialized or esoteric. The most detailed information …
Check out this excellent blue note
I got a question from a Twitter friend: Oh @ethanhein, a blues tonality Q for you: On Muddy Waters’s “Double Trouble,” on the LP Sings Big Bill, James Cotton opens his harp solo w/a note so ripe it almost derails the record —yet somehow it works. My Q: what makes that note so bracing? Link: …
I Want To Hold Your Hand
My kids are deep into the Beatles right now, and unlike me, they like the early stuff as much as the late stuff. So I find myself listening repeatedly to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time in basically forever. As with so many Beatles songs, the silly lyrics are sitting on …