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. Classical Remixes Volume One …
Category Archives: Autobio
Introducing Tuniversity
Introducing Tuniversity by Dr. Ethan Hein and my co-founder, veteran songwriter and teacher Derek Fawcett Read on Substack 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, and we are holding our inaugural Tune Up event at the end …
What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over
I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any …
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Free improvisation
Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jazz; Ramin is a classical composer and …
I’m in this Adam Neely video about AI
I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.
Things I wrote in 2025
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. …
Advanced Pop Transcription wrap-up
I just concluded my first semester teaching Advanced Popular Music Transcription in NYU’s new pop theory and aural skills sequence. The students transcribe recorded music into notation, and also analyze production techniques and timbre. Learning by ear is an essential skill for pop musicians. Even when you are using charts, accurate ones are rarely available. …
D’Angelo tribute on MusicRadar
For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one. I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see …
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 …
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Introducing my first podcast guest, my daughter
Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.