New Orff arrangements with Heather Fortune

Heather Fortune and I are delighted to announce the publication of 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensemble, available now from the good people at F-flat Books. If you teach elementary music, you should check them out!

We discuss the process behind and purpose of this music on F-flat’s podcast:

The arrangements grew out of a series of groove-oriented instrumental method books that Heather and I are working on. As we were building our collection of grooves and patterns, Heather realized that some of them would work well as Orff music. I wrote the (very silly) lyrics. The pieces are structured around repetitive grooves that build gradually in complexity – read more about that idea here. You can play them as through-composed pieces, or you can use them as modular kits for assembling your own music.

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We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

I was not expecting to write a post on here about Taylor Swift. I have nothing against her and wish her the best, I’m just not her target audience. But when you have kids, you find yourself in all kinds of new situations. Ever since my daughter started second grade, she has gone from mildly Taylor-curious to being a full-blown Swiftie. We’ve been listening to the greatest hits together, and so far, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is the one I like the best. It’s from Taylor’s 2012 album Red, and it was her first number one Billboard hit. She co-wrote and co-produced it with Max Martin and Shellback.

Taylor also released a version for country radio. It has the banjo mixed louder, it lacks the backwards guitar parts and synth swooshes, and the drums don’t have such a conspicuously electronic timbre. I think the pop version is better. 

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Freedom Jazz Dance

A friend texted me to tell me that he was listening to a jazz show on public radio in Denver, and that they referenced an old blog post of mine about “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. That was a pleasant surprise, and it made me want to go back to the post and freshen it up. So here are some new thoughts about what is arguably the weirdest jazz standard.

To be clear, there are many weirder jazz tunes than this, but not in the core repertoire. Also, “weird” does not mean “complex”. This tune is radical in its simplicity. In fact, it is so radically simple that usually when other people play it, they insert more structure into it. It illustrates the surprising fact that the simpler a tune is, the harder it can be for jazz musicians to improvise on it. We will get to this idea in more depth below.

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Artificial intelligence in music

We are kicking off my Musical Borrowing class at the New School with a discussion of artificial intelligence in music. I decided to start here because 1) we are covering concepts in reverse chronological order; 2) the students are going to want to talk about it anyway; and 3) this is the least interesting topic of the course for me personally, so I’d prefer to get it out of the way. To get everybody oriented, I assigned this mostly optimistic take on AI music from Ableton’s web site. Then we did some in-class listening and discussion.

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Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing

Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up to the much more guitarist-friendly key of E minor. 

Yusuf Roahman plays shaker and Sheila Wilkerson plays bongos and güiro, and Stevie plays everything else: piano, (synth) bass and drums. I assume that Stevie put down the piano first and then they overdubbed everything on top?

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Musical Borrowing syllabus

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan.

This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these borrowings challenge conventional notions of originality and authenticity. The course provides historical perspectives on musical borrowing from the Renaissance through 19th-century paraphrases and 20th-century cover versions to debates about sampling and plagiarism cases today. It explores the evolving cultural, philosophical, legal, and economic considerations around the phenomenon of musical borrowing. Students engage with these topics through guided listenings, readings, response papers, quizzes, class presentations, and creative projects, with a final research/analysis paper on a recent/current case of musical borrowing. A basic knowledge of music theory and some ability to read music notation are helpful but not required for this course.

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Dies irae

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation. Its first musical setting was a Gregorian chant in Dorian mode from the 13th century.

Fun fact! In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the self-flagellating monks are chanting the last few lines of the Dies irae sequence.

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Technology in Music Education – updated syllabus

This fall, I am teaching Technology in Music Education at Western Illinois University. The students are in-service music teachers who are working toward masters degrees. Here’s my syllabus.

I have left out administrative details and university boilerplate. Feel free to use any of this as you see fit, but if you do, please tell me, I’m always interested to hear.

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If I Fell

Is this the coolest pre-Revolver Beatles song? In terms of notes on the page, it very well could be.

My daughter and I managed to sing the harmony parts together the other night. She has a good ear for a seven year old, but also, the harmonies in that song are so clear and intuitive, it’s like they want to help you sing themselves.

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Bach’s Duet in E minor BWV 802

I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!

The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.

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