Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and …
Continue reading “Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education”
Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing …
Continue reading “Building Hip-Hop Educators – new book chapter abstract”
Someday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas …
See the complete Talking Heads series The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges. Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, …
If you study music theory in a typical school setting, you might get the idea that the V-I cadence is the fundamental cornerstone of all harmony, or at least, of all “Western” harmony. In a standard theory course, V-I is the first chord progression that you study, and for several weeks or months, it may …
This post was published in the Journal of Popular Music Education! Pierre Schaeffer and DJ Premier Introduction Digital audio workstation software, recording equipment and MIDI controllers have become steadily less expensive and easier to learn over the past two decades. As a result, it has become possible for schools at all levels to offer “an …
Continue reading “The politics is in the drums: Producing and composing in the music classroom”
Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made. The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty …
My man Adam has a word: Music is the universal language the same way English is, in that it isn't — Adam Neely (@its_adamneely) May 3, 2021 I can prove this with an example from my own life. When I was younger I got interested in my Jewish heritage and spent a couple of years …
Continue reading “Music is not a universal language and this klezmer song proves it”
The hardest songwriting assignment I’m giving to the NYU Pop Music Practicum is to write and record a short original rap verse. The students come from classical, jazz and musical theater backgrounds, and while many of them enjoy listening to rap, almost none have tried making it. So we are all outside of our comfort …
Continue reading “I am making my students write raps and I wrote one too”
Everyone’s favorite music theorist is back in the news. If you are curious about the controversy surrounding him and don’t have a music theory background, I wrote a Twitter thread for you: Okay! Clearly, you people want to read about Schenker! Here, I will add some context to this NY Times article so you can …
Continue reading “Who is Heinrich Schenker and why should you care?”
