I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts. My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of …
Category Archives: Improvisation
The fake and the real in Chance the Rapper’s “All We Got”
[I wrote this before Kanye went full MAGA; I have since lost some enthusiasm for him.] Every semester in Intro to Music Tech, we have Kanye West Day, when we listen analytically to some of Yeezy’s most sonically adventurous tracks (there are many to choose from.) The past few semesters, Kanye West Day has centered …
Continue reading “The fake and the real in Chance the Rapper’s “All We Got””
Happy 100th birthday to Thelonious Monk
Here’s Monk playing four Duke Ellington tunes, followed by his own “Crepuscule with Nellie” and a blues.
Music Matters chapter seven
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving …
QWERTYBeats research
Writing assignment for Design For The Real World with Claire Kearney-Volpe and Diana Castro – research about a new rhythm interface for blind and low-vision novice musicians Definition I propose a new web-based accessible rhythm instrument called QWERTYBeats. Traditional instruments are highly accessible to blind and low-vision musicians. Electronic music production tools are not. I look at the history …
Composing in the classroom
The hippest music teachers help their students create original music. But what exactly does that mean? What even is composition? In this post, I take a look at two innovators in music education and try to arrive at an answer. Matt McLean is the founder of the amazing Young Composers and Improvisers Workshop. He teaches his students composition using …
Rohan lays beats
The Ed Sullivan Fellows program is an initiative by the NYU MusEDLab connecting up-and-coming hip-hop musicians to mentors, studio time, and creative and technical guidance. Our session this past Saturday got off to an intense start, talking about the role of young musicians of color in a world of the police brutality and Black Lives Matter. The Fellows are …
Inside the aQWERTYon
Update: try the Theory aQWERTYon! The MusEDLab and Soundfly just launched Theory For Producers, an interactive music theory course. The centerpiece of the interactive component is a MusEDLab tool called the aQWERTYon. You can try it by clicking the image below. (You need to use Chrome.) In this post, I’ll talk about why and how we developed the …
Musical Simples: Once In A Lifetime
“Once In A Lifetime” is a simple but remarkable tune based on a simple but remarkable scale: the major pentatonic. Like its cousin the minor pentatonic scale, major pentatonic is found in just about every world musical culture. It’s also incredibly ancient. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a paleontologist plays an unmistakeable …
Musical simples part two
Here’s an explanation for why I’m gathering these things. Wagner, “Ride of the Valkyries” I’m no great fan of Wagner, but there’s no denying that this is a killer hook. You don’t have much occasion to play in 9/8 time these days, but this melody can be adapted to fit 4/4 pretty easily. Also, because …