Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it.
But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever sung “row row row your boat” in a round, that is also counterpoint.
I made a big spreadsheet with all the chords in it. It’s not all the possible chords, but it’s the ones you most commonly encounter in Western classical, jazz, rock and pop.
I also made some videos explaining how chords work, with handy aQWERTYon visualization. Enjoy!
Partially to prepare for remote teaching my courses, and partially to keep myself from losing my mind, I’m putting a bunch of new videos on YouTube. I’m starting with material I’ve done many times in classes and conference presentations, and then will be branching out into newer stuff as I go.
I imagine that these will also get looser and more podcast-y as I go along, so if you have requests for topics or themes, please let me know.
This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health.
This post is something new for me: an online prose score, in the spirit of Pauline Oliveros.
Harmonica Meditation
For unaccompanied ten-hole diatonic harmonica, in any key.
One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” Listen at 3:35.
That might be the single hardest, funkiest thing in jazz history. I did my best to transcribe it, though I’m not a hundred percent confident about the left-hand voicings.
McCoy influenced my guitar playing in a major way – his iconic fourths chords translate better to guitar than most piano voicings. I have done my best jazz playing by planing fourths chords up and down chromatically or by bigger jumps. I certainly can’t play single lines as fast as McCoy could, but I have strived to imitate his swing and power.
I’m continuing my journey through rhythmic analyses of canonical classical works with Metrical Displacement and Metrically Dissonant Hemiolas by Channan Willner. One of the pieces that Willner analyzes is the Gigue from Bach’s English Suite No. 5 in E minor, played here by Glenn Gould.
Continue reading “Metrical dissonance in the Gigue from Bach’s E minor English Suite”
I’m trying to get better at understanding classical music, ideally without doing too much Schenkerian analysis. I can hunt for cadences as well as anyone who’s been to music school, and I understand how important they are as structural elements in the Western canon. But there’s more to this music than harmony. It has rhythm too, and I’m curious to know who’s studying that aspect. While digging through Google Scholar results, I found John Rink’s rhythmic analysis of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 No 3. This is the one where Chopin starts with one of his loveliest, most achingly wistful melodies, and then inexplicably launches into Cloud Cuckooland. Here’s a recording by Maurizio Pollini.
I was unsurprised to learn from Wikipedia that the main melody has been repurposed for many pop songs over the past 150 years, though they tend not to use the crazy part. An example:
Garrett Schumann posted on Twitter about Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E major, Op 11 No 5, one of the great one-hit wonders of the Western canon.
I didn’t recognize the title and composer, but the music itself was instantly familiar to me as a film score cliche signifying classiness. When I posted that observation, Christopher Hunter responded.
I knew the tune on the first note and never knew who it came from, it's the amen break of snobbery
— Christopher Hunter (@chunter16) February 21, 2020
That phrase is so precisely correct.
I have some aspirations in music theory pedagogy, and toward that end, I’m learning more about Schenkerian analysis. If I’m going to resist it, I should at least be conversant in the thing I’m resisting, right? So I’ve been reading Schenkerian Analysis: Perspectives on Phrase Rhythm, Motive and Form by David Beach. One of his examples is the opening nine bars of the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Op. 117: No. 2. Listen here:
Continue reading “Let’s argue about this one weird chord in the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor”
