Defining key centers with rhythm

Let’s say you have two chords, G7 and C. According to Western classical theory, these two chords establish that you are in the key of C. The G7 is tense and unresolved, and it makes you yearn for the calm stability of C. Music theory resources are full of language about how dominant seventh chords are always dissonant and always need to be resolved. For example…

  • Wikipedia: “Dominant seventh chords contain a strong dissonance, a tritone between the chord’s third and seventh.”
  • Andre Mount: “Whereas a triad may be consonant, a seventh chord is inherently dissonant.”
  • Jason Solomon: “The chord progression I-V-I is the essence of tonal harmony. The framing tonic chords serve as stable points of departure and return. The dominant destabilizes the tonic to set up its eventual return.”
  • Alfred Blatter: “Seventh chords by virtue of their more dissonant (unstable) nature create a strong harmonic drive toward a resolution. The strongest and most familiar of these is the dominant seventh chord, which almost compels the arrival of the implied tonic chord.”

Even jazz resources use this language.

  • The Jazz Piano Site: “The Dominant chord is an inherently dissonant chord because it has a tritone interval between its 3rd and 7th, and as such it wants to resolve towards the consonant Tonic chord.”
  • Dariusz Terefenko: “The dominant is an antithesis of the tonic in every conceivable way: it is highly unstable, represents chords on the move, accumulates harmonic tension, and does not rest until it reaches a local or structural tonic.”

Yeah, but the thing is, this is not true! Dominant seventh chords are dissonant only in particular stylistic contexts, namely, Western European folk and classical and the musics that descend from them. In blues, rock, jazz, and lots of pop music, dominant seventh chords can be tonic chords too, and they can sound perfectly resolved. The G7 and C chords might actually be defining the key of G, not C.

This is not just music theory arcana! If you want to play the blues on a C harmonica, you need to take an instrument that was designed to play G7 and C in the key of C major, and play it backwards so that you think of it as being G7 and C in the key of G blues. Continue reading “Defining key centers with rhythm”

Music Theory Songs

Ashanti Mills from my Patreon had a brilliant idea. He said, hey, you know how you combined interviews with Toni Blackman with hip-hop songs to explain hip-hop pedagogy? You should do that with music theory: have songs that explain their musical content to you. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious as soon as I hear it, but it took Ashanti suggesting it to make me realize that. So: here is my first batch!

The whole thing came together very quickly. In some cases, I took teaching materials I already developed in Noteflight, exported the MIDI, dropped it into Ableton, added beats, and went from there. In other cases, the idea existed in my head and just needed some a little trial and error to realize it.

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Chords and modal interchange

One of the most powerful music theory concepts you can learn is how to make chords from scales. If you learn a few scales, then you get a whole bunch of chords for free. The specifics of all the chord names can be complicated and daunting. But the concept of constructing them is very simple. Take a seven-note scale, like, for example, C major.

Start on any note. That’s your chord root. Go around the scale clockwise, skipping the next scale degree to land on the following one. That’s your third. Go around clockwise and skip the next scale degree to land on the following one. That’s your fifth. Do the same thing to find the seventh. (You can also keep going to get the ninth, the eleventh, and the thirteenth. Then you will have used all the notes in the scale.) Any seven note scale will produce seven different chords, and they will all sound good together in any order and any combination.

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Waiting For Benny

The Genius of the Electric Guitar is an aptly-named compilation of studio recordings that Charlie Christian made with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. The album includes a couple of informal studio jams recorded while Goodman’s band was waiting for their leader to show up. Both jams have self-explanatory titles: “Blues in B” and “Waiting For Benny.” The latter one is where the real magic happens.

After a minute and a half of jamming in the key of A, Charlie Christian suddenly cues the band into a tune. Its key is ambiguous at first, but once the piano comes in, it quickly reveals itself to be F. I had always known this tune simply as “Waiting For Benny,” as do many other jazz fans. However, Benny Goodman later recorded it under the title “A Smo-o-o-oth One.” Apparently this recording was made at the same session as “Waiting For Benny”, though the documentation is unclear. Continue reading “Waiting For Benny”

The politics is in the drums: Producing and composing in the music classroom

This post was published in the Journal of Popular Music Education!

Pierre Schaeffer and DJ Premier

Introduction

Digital audio workstation software, recording equipment and MIDI controllers have become steadily less expensive and easier to learn over the past two decades. As a result, it has become possible for schools at all levels to offer “an art class for music” (Kuhn & Hein, 2021) in which students learn to write and produce original songs. However, music teachers in the United States usually find themselves unprepared to teach such a class. University music education programs focus on the performance and history of Western art music to the near exclusion of all else. When these programs address electronic music, it is usually in the context of “art” music. It is extremely rare for a preservice music teacher to learn to produce dance music or hip-hop.

As I write this, music technology courses are becoming more the norm than the exception in American university music programs, at least as electives, and are spreading rapidly throughout secondary schools as well. The coronavirus pandemic has driven a rapid adoption of technology-driven instruction out of necessity. The curriculum standards, subject matter and classroom practices of school music technology courses are still very much in flux. The music education field therefore has a unique opportunity to shape and define music technology as a subject before it becomes fully standardized. I will argue that it is not enough to teach preservice music teachers the skills needed to create electronic musics. Music educators must also engage with aesthetics and cultural contexts. It is particularly important that they critically examine the racialized divide between “art” and “popular” music.

Continue reading “The politics is in the drums: Producing and composing in the music classroom”

Spoonful

One of the most intense and arresting recordings I have ever heard is Howlin’ Wolf’s recording of “Spoonful” by Willie Dixon.

This is on my list of classic songs with no chord changes, along with “Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin, “India” by John Coltrane, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” by John Lee Hooker, “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone” by the Temptations, and “Shhh/Peaceful” by Miles Davis.

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No, Rolling Stone, D minor is not the saddest of all keys

We all love This Is Spin̈al Tap, but you’re not supposed to take it literally.

Nevertheless, this very silly Rolling Stone article tries to prove Nigel right. The author is a doctoral student in quantitative methods. She should probably have asked a music theorist about this before publishing it, or really any musical person. I won’t go through everything wrong that’s in here, just a few high (low) points.

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Lightnin’ Hopkins – “My California”

I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording.

Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes it easier for you to play along. The big challenge was to figure out the meter, which changes constantly. I aligned the Hopkins track to the grid over a drum machine kick, programmed in the tempo changes, and used audio to MIDI conversion as a starting point for my transcription. Then I sweated out the details in Dorico, before bringing the MIDI back into Ableton to make the visualization. There was necessarily quite a lot of interpretation involved here.

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I made a Patreon page

I have a lot of blog posts and videos in the pipeline, but I’m feeling some anxiety about where all this work is taking me. Don’t get me wrong, I love blogging for the sake of blogging, it has improved my life immeasurably and has had major professional benefits as well. But it’s not very lucrative, and neither is academia, so I’m developing other plans too. I have some ambitions in commercial publishing and business, but these things move slowly and the rewards are far in the future. Meanwhile, I love blogging and Twitter (and also, recently, YouTube) because they’re so immediate. I write stream of consciousness threads, turn them into posts and videos, and continually refine and update them in response to all the feedback. It’s fun, like teaching without all the bureaucracy!

Someone on Twitter suggested that I try Patreon, and my feeling is, why not?

So what am I hoping to achieve with this?

  • Money in my pocket so I can keep rolling out the blog posts and videos with less guilt and anxiety about other things I’m supposed to be doing.
  • More feedback from the people who value my stuff the most, and more incentive for me to give them more of what they want.
  • A new place to build community. Apparently there are a lot of lurkers out there who don’t write blog comments or Twitter replies but who would happily make their presence known through Patreon. Someone suggested I do Adam-Neely-style Q&As, and I love this idea. I’d also be open to taking requests for songs to analyze or production techniques to break down. I’m interested to see what other ideas you folks have for me.

I have undertaken all of my online activities in the spirit of, okay, well, this thing seems cool, what happens when I post a lot stuff here? So far the rewards (lots of new friends, some great jobs, a doctoral fellowship, regular dopamine hits) have vastly outweighed the downside (occasional right wing hate mail). So let’s see what transpires with Patreon!

Nature Boy

There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. His name was eden ahbez, he was a hippie decades before that was a common thing to be, and he wrote “Nature Boy“, which Nat King Cole turned into a major hit. The tune has become a jazz and pop standard, and has been recorded uncountably many times. I used Ableton Live to make a mix of my favorite versions, along with some related music:

Continue reading “Nature Boy”