Why are D-sharp and E-flat considered to be two different notes

Why do the black keys on the piano each have two different names? If the posts on r/musictheory are any indication, this is a persistent point of confusion, especially when music theory teachers get all persnickety about using the correct name.

This confusion applies to all of the black keys, but in this post, I’ll be talking about the one between D and E. You could think of it as a raised D, in which case it’s called D-sharp. You could also think of it as a lowered E, in which case it’s called E-flat. Guitars don’t have black and white keys, so when I was a feral self-taught musician, I just thought of that note as the eleventh fret on the E string, the sixth fret on the A string, the first fret on the D string, etc. I pretty much always called it E-flat, regardless of context. I have since learned to use the correct name, but it still feels arbitrary sometimes, especially outside of diatonicism. If you are in B major, the note is supposed to be called D-sharp, and if you are in B-flat major, the note is supposed to be called E-flat, that makes sense. But what if you’re in A blues? How are you supposed to spell it then? And what difference does it make anyway?

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Bach’s mysterious Sarabande

While learning and learning about the Prelude to Bach’s G minor Lute Suite, I also came into contact with the suite’s Sarabande. This piece is famous among music theorists, because while it’s only forty measures long, those forty measures are action-packed, harmonically speaking. Here’s a performance by Evangelina Mascardi.

I appreciate that Mascardi doesn’t play it with too much melodrama or rubato. Note that, like most lutenists, she’s using Baroque tuning, so it sounds like she’s playing in F-sharp minor.

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Bach’s Lute Suite in G minor

I don’t get a lot of music-related correspondence on LinkedIn, so I was surprised when a stranger wrote me a very nice message there about my deep dive into the Bach Chaconne. He mentioned that he was learning the prelude to the Lute Suite in G Minor, BWV 995, and that he liked Göran Söllscher’s recording of it. He pointed out that the piece shares some DNA with the Chaconne. That made me want to learn it too.

Regardless of what this album cover art might suggest, Göran Söllscher is playing the guitar. If you want to hear the piece played on an actual lute, I recommend Stephen Stubbs‘ recording. Stubbs is using Baroque tuning, which is quite a bit lower than the standard tuning reference pitch we use today.

Here’s Thomas Dunford playing the suite on an archlute. He’s too free with his time for my taste, but it’s cool to see what he’s doing.

I like non-guitar fretted instruments, and over the years I have learned to play the mandolin, mandola, banjo, and ukulele. So I naturally got curious about learning the lute. However, I got discouraged quickly, because there are uncountably many configurations of lute strings tuned in uncountably many different ways. It seems like you would either have to pick one at random and commit to it, or be able to adapt to whatever instrument setup you happen to encounter. So I’ll stick to playing Bach on the guitar for now.

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Tennessee Jed

The Grateful Dead always had a folkie/Americana aspect, but in the early 1970s they leaned hard into country music, and it suited them. I found this song to be pretty cringe as a teenaged Deadhead in New York City, but it grew on me.

The tune is named for a 1940s radio Western, which sounds like it could have been the basis for Woody’s Roundup in Toy Story 2. For all I know, Robert Hunter had never been within a thousand miles of Tennessee when he wrote the lyrics, but they work okay if you don’t think about them too hard.

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Patrice Rushen’s memory songs

White people do not generally grow up listening to Patrice Rushen; we have to seek her out. I only got hip to her when I heard her speak at the 2018 Ableton Loop conference in Los Angeles. I quickly learned that she co-wrote and produced one of the bangingest bangers in history.

The devastating bassline is by Freddie Washington, and the silky smooth sax is by Gerald Albright. I don’t normally go in for this style of R&B sax, but that solo is too funky and on point to resist.

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Bach Anxiety

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 and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:

I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in! Continue reading “Bach Anxiety”

Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues

There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.

Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.

Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading “Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues”

Groove: an aesthetic of measured time

As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.

Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.

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Human Behaviour

Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them!

This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video was directed by Michel Gondry, the first of many.

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Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime

Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her.

If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.

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