Partially to prepare for remote teaching my courses, and partially to keep myself from losing my mind, I’m putting a bunch of new videos on YouTube. I’m starting with material I’ve done many times in classes and conference presentations, and then will be branching out into newer stuff as I go. I imagine that these …
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This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health. Big collections: A spreadsheet of online music theory resources and projects, plus my New School syllabus that uses many of these things. A spreadsheet of online music technology resources and projects. The NYSSMA Best Practices Database.
Build A Fort is the drums/saxophone duo of Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir, two of the leading lights in progressive music education. The title of their new album, Ignorant Populists, is presumably a play on their role in advancing popular music pedagogy. The album was mostly recorded while Gareth was in New York and …
Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this …
This week I begin another iteration of my NYU class, a music technology crash course for future music teachers. Given the vastness of the subject matter and the constraints of a one-semester course, the challenge is always to figure out what to put in and what to leave out. I continue to take a project-based …
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If you want to understand Western music theory, the circle of fifths is an invaluable tool. For one thing, it can help you understand how key signatures work. But it also helps explain how the major scale and diatonic modes relate to each other, and gives a possible explanation for why they sound good. Here’s …
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Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me. …
Continue reading “Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante”
In trying to learn (and learn about) the Bach Chaconne, I’m facing a struggle that’s familiar from trying to learn about jazz. The chaconne is a dance form originating in the Americas, or among African people who were brought to the Americas. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought the chaconne to Europe in the early 1600s, …
Two big things happened in my academic life this year: I wrote a dissertation proposal (which is not quite done yet), and I developed and taught a music theory course at the New School. Both of these projects featured heavily on this blog. Here are some high points.
When I cover dynamics and loudness in music theory class, I only spend a small part of the time talking about forte/piano, crescendo/diminuendo and so on. Once you have the Italian translations, those terms are self-explanatory. They are also frustratingly subjective, and they refer only to unamplified acoustic music. To understand dynamics in the present …
