Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague’s theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just …
Continue reading “I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures”
This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I …
Continue reading “The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory”
This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard! In this post, I …
Publication alert! I co-wrote a book chapter about hip-hop in the music classroom with Toni Blackman, one of my major music education heroes and the central figure in my doctoral dissertation. It’s called “Building Hip-Hop Music Educators: Personal Reflections on Rap Songwriting in the Classroom.” It’s part of a new edited volume about hip-hop education that is …
In a previous post, I suggested that we think of an expanded major key universe that includes the major scale, Mixolydian mode, Lydian mode, and maybe also Mixolydian b6. In this post, I present a similar approach to minor keys, by extending the logic of Western European tonal theory to cover some additional minor scale …
There are two ways to understand intervals: the right way, and the way I learned them. Before we get into that, let me point you to some good resources for learning the right way. I like the online tutorials by Robert Hutchinson, Chelsey Hamm and Bryn Hughes, musictheory.net and musicca.com. I really love Nate May’s visual …
Sit down at the piano and play the chords C and F in root position, back and forth, like so: (C E G) to (F A C). Pretty clunky! Now invert the C chord; that is, move the bottom note up an octave. Alternate that version of the C chord with the F chord, like …
The basic idea of tempo is simple: how many beats there are per minute. More beats per minute means the music is faster, fewer beats per minute means the music is slower. The image below shows a tempo map of “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles that I made with Ableton Live. The song’s tempo ranges …
(Meta-level note: I rewrite this explainer every few years and now that I have a couple of new music theory gigs, I am rewriting it yet again.) Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony: conflict, surprise, defiance of expectation. If you place your rhythmic accents where listeners expect them, then the music gets …
The top number in a time signature is easy to understand. Is the song in four? Count “one, two, three, four.” Is it in three? Count “one, two, three.” Is it in five? Count “one, two, three, four, five.” That’s all there is to it. However, the bottom number is another story. What is going …
Continue reading “The bottom number in time signatures has always confused me”
