Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar! The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.” But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the …
Category Archives: Composition
Pieces vs Songs vs Grooves
In preparation for making a bunch of new YouTube videos, I have been thinking about Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves. It’s a useful scheme for thinking about pop, but it doesn’t cover everything in Western music. We need a third category for linear through-composed music. So here’s my proposal: all of the music …
Chain of Fools
“Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin is a song I loved for many years just for listening and enjoying, but then I started to love it even more as a music theory teaching example. It’s emblematic of blues tonality, one-chord changes, and groove structure. The released version is edited down from its original arrangement, which …
Oye Como Va
Santana’s recording of “Oye Como Va” is one of the most outrageous grooves I’ve ever heard. David Welna describes it as “a Cuban cha-cha composed by a Puerto Rican New Yorker and performed by a Mexican immigrant and his San Francisco rock band.” It’s red-hot from its opening seconds. As the organ starts the montuno, …
Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor
A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome. Bach got the first half …
Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne
You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this): This …
Green Onions
Is this the coolest music that has ever been recorded? I don’t mean cool in the sense of fashionable (though it is) or appealing (though it is), I mean it in the sense of laconic confidence in its bad self. Booker T and the MGs recorded the tune without a title, and then when the …
Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus XI
Here it is, the most stupendous entry in The Art of Fugue. Its three themes are inversions of the ones in Contrapunctus VIII, meaning that they have the same rhythms and intervals but are upside down. Bach also added lots of subthemes and counterthemes. I used Ableton Live to visualize Angela Hewitt’s recording, drawing extensively …
Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus VIII
In this post, I’m digging deeper into Bach’s The Art of Fugue with Contrapunctus VIII. It’s way more complex and intense than Contrapunctus I. I used Ableton Live to line up a MIDI file of the piece with Angela Hewitt’s recording, and then color-coded and annotated it to show the structure, the harmony, the subjects …
The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I
JS Bach’s last set of works, collectively titled The Art of Fugue, was published shortly after his death. It was not a big hit. Dense counterpoint was deeply unfashionable at that time, as Western European aristocratic tastes shifted toward singable melodies over block chords. The first published edition of The Art of Fugue only sold …