Väkevä, L. (2010). “Garage band or GarageBand®? Remixing musical futures.” British Journal of Music Education, 27(01), 59. I believe that music education should engage with the music that’s meaningful to students. The field is coming to agree with me. School music programs have been gradually embracing rock, for example via Modern Band. Which is great! Unfortunately, rock stopped being …
Category Archives: Race and Identity
Music education at the grownups’ table
I was asked by Alison Armstrong to comment on this Time magazine op-ed by Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Before I do, let me give some context: Todd Stoll is a friend and colleague of Wynton Marsalis, and he shares some of Wynton’s beliefs about music. Wynton Marsalis advocates for jazz as …
RIP David Bowie
Hearing the news of Bowie’s death made me go listen to Blackstar, which is excellent, his best work in I don’t know how long. His voice aged exquisitely well. So did his restless sonic adventurism: the man never settled in a style for very long. This particular one suits him.
Resisting imperialism through secular devotion
I have struggled for years to articulate why I like the music descending from Africa so much better than the music descending from Europe. I’m a typical American in this respect. Every genre that the mainstream enjoys takes its rhythms and loop structures from the African diaspora: rock, hip-hop, and EDM, of course, but country too, and pop, which …
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The harmonica explains all of Western music
If you want to understand the vast cultural struggle taking place in the study of Western harmony, you could do worse than to start with the harmonica. This unassuming little instrument was designed in central Europe in the 19th century to play the popular music of that time and place: waltzes, oom-pah music, and light …
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Music theory blues
I’m reading a lot Schenkerian analyses of blues right now in service of my forthcoming article about blues tonality. Each paper I read is wronger than the last. On the one hand, they fill me with righteous rage, but on the other hand, that rage does at least help me focus my arguments. Here are …
Blues tonality
See a more beginner-friendly blues primer here. Read this treatise in Spanish, translated by Jesús Fernández. Abstract The blues is a foundational element of America’s vernacular and art music. It is commonly described as a combination of African rhythms and European harmonies. This description is inaccurate. Blues follows harmonic conventions that are quite different from …
Recording Peter Gabriel’s Security
This post was originally written for the Play With Your Music blog. Also be sure to check out our interview with engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta. Peter Gabriel’s songwriting and recording process in the early 1980s was unusual for its technological sophistication, playfulness and reliance on improvisation. While Peter was considered avant-garde back …
Why do suburban white kids like gangsta rap?
A followup post to White People And Hip-Hop First, a little on my background. I’m not from the suburbs, I’m from New York City. My experience growing up was an odd blend of the city and the suburbs. I lived in a posh little corner of an otherwise pretty tough neighborhood. I attended a very …
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Rockism
As a kid, I liked everything: rock, hip-hop, classical, jazz, pop, dance, country, whatever. In my teenage years, however, I succumbed to the pressures of a racist society and turned into a devout rockist. I dutifully renounced pop, disco, techno, even hip-hop, anything that was “inauthentic.” I swallowed the rockist dogma that grants legitimacy to …