My fellow radical music educator Jared O’Leary wrote a pretty remarkable paper with a deceptively dry title: A Content Analysis on the Use of the Word ‘Talent’ in the Journal of Research in Music Education, 1953-2012. It got me thinking about talent, and what a pernicious concept it is.
Category Archives: Emotion
Composing speech
Robert Davidson’s first-ever tweet is a remarkable one: https://twitter.com/robcomposer/status/558447982807248896 Rob’s tweet raises three profound questions in my mind.
The saddest chord progression ever
See also the happiest chord progression ever. The short-lived Russian composer Vasily Kalinnikov is best known (to the extent he’s known at all) for this piece of music: If you listen to this piece at 6:16, there’s a particularly beautiful and tragic chord progression. It’s in the key of E-flat, but I transposed it into C …
Why do people love music so much?
We’re attracted to music for the same reason we’re attracted to fire: it’s been a critical survival tool for us for hundreds of thousands of years. Music cognition is one of the first high-level brain functions to emerge in infants, coming long before walking and talking. It’s also one of the last to go in …
Toward a statement of purpose
I’m in the process of applying for a PhD in music education, and I have to come up with a statement of purpose. Here’s my most current draft. I dream of a world where music education serves everyone, not just potential classical virtuosos, with a radically revised curriculum that erases the distinction between “school music” …
Happy birthday Thelonious Monk
Here’s a bunch of concert footage, don’t deny yourself the joy of watching Monk play. And dance while other musicians play.
Participatory music vs presentational music
In this post, I’ll be doing some public-facing note-taking on Music As Social Life: The Politics Of Participation by Thomas Turino. I’m especially interested in chapter two: Participatory and Presentational Performance. We in America tend to place a high value on presentational music created by professionals, and a low value on participatory music made by …
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Play with your music theory
Last week I put together a new set of music theory videos. These videos are aimed at participants in Play With Your Music, who may want to start producing their own music or remixes and have no idea where to start. I’m presuming that the viewer has no formal background, no piano skills and no …
Everyone can and should be making music
I have a strongly held belief about musical talent: there is no such thing. Every neurotypical human is born with the ability to learn music, the same way the vast majority of us are born with the ability to learn to walk and talk. We still have to do the learning, though; otherwise the capacity …
Can science make a better music theory?
My last post discussed how we should be deriving music theory from empirical observation of what people like using ethnomusicology. Another good strategy would be to derive music theory from observation of what’s going on between our ears. Daniel Shawcross Wilkerson has attempted just that in his essay, Harmony Explained: Progress Towards A Scientific Theory …