Hobo Blues

Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we can learn from them. I am especially interested in examples that don’t follow the standard twelve bar blues form or use the I, IV and V chords. Too many music education resources boil the blues down to these tropes, and I want students to understand that the music is more stylistically diverse than that. For example, listen to “Hobo Blues” by John Lee Hooker, which he first recorded in 1949.

This song sounds like the blues, but it doesn’t use the twelve bar form or the IV and V chords. Does it even have a form or chords at all? It’s more like an open-ended drone. Hooker learned this style of playing from his stepfather William Moore, who was from Louisiana where the blues sounded different from the predominant style of the Mississippi Delta.

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New MusicRadar column about Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”

This one was assigned by my editor, and I went into the song more or less cold. I ended up liking the song, though maybe that’s because so many of my students adore Chappell Roan and I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe she’s just good!

Anyway, as the column evolves, I am glad that it isn’t just about me and my whims. (You get plenty of that here on this blog.) Having an incentive to pay attention to this kind of song keeps me young.

Devil Got My Woman

The movie Ghost World tells us that people who are obsessed with old blues records are creeps, but also that old blues records are worth being obsessed with. There’s a pivotal scene where Enid, the young protagonist, hears “Devil Got My Woman” by Skip James, and reacts to it in much the same way that I do.

“There are no other records like that.” No, there really aren’t. Continue reading “Devil Got My Woman”

Russian Lullaby

When I was in college, I liked to dip into the dollar bin at the record store. That’s where I picked up Jerry Garcia’s second solo album. It was forgettable, even for an obsessive fan like me. Forgettable, that is, except for one song:

I had never heard of Django Reinhardt at that point, and I had no idea what I was hearing. All I knew was that I loved it. Jerry Garcia had his ups and downs as an artist, but he always had great taste in other people’s music.

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The F-Flat Annual Back-to-School Symposium

Music ed folks! If you need some PD credit this summer, check out the online Annual Back-to-School Symposium presented by the good people at F-Flat Books. Heather Fortune and I are doing a session on groove and improvisation in ensemble classes. 

The lineup includes some of the people I admire most in the field: Brandi Waller-Pace, Shane Colquhoun, Steve Giddings, Kat Reinhert, and many others. Expect to learn a thing or two.

The minor key universe

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 variants.

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Joy To The Modes

The best way to teach the diatonic modes is to compare them to each other in parallel. One way to do that is to just run up and down them scalewise, but that isn’t very musically satisfying. So I thought, how about putting a familiar melody into all the modes? I wanted one that touches every note in the diatonic scale, and that fits within one octave. “Joy To The World” fit the bill perfectly.

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Understanding intervals

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 approach. And if you like learning from videos (which I don’t), this one by Saher Galt is good. I find it most helpful to visualize the intervallic structure of the diatonic scale on a circle, and if you like to think that way too, try the aQWERTYon.

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What is voice leading?

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 so: (E G C) to (F A C). It sounds smoother! You just experienced the magic of voice leading.

To understand how voice leading works, imagine that each note in a chord is being sung by a different person. For three-note chords, you will need three people. Let’s call them David Crosby, Steven Stills and Graham Nash. (In the photo, they’re sitting Nash, Stills, Crosby.)

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Visualizing note and rest durations

Kids need to learn how to read staff notation. However, they would rather look at the MIDI piano roll. My question is, why not show them both? Each view has its own affordances. Staff notation is more human-readable and space-efficient, but the piano roll is more discoverable for beginners. The staff doesn’t show microrhythmic subtleties, but it isn’t supposed to; the performer adds those.

Here are some note durations in both views:

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