My kids love “Starfish and Coffee”, and rightly so. The version on Sign o’ the Times is fine and all, but for me, this is the canonical recording, both musically and visually:
According to the Genius annotation, Cynthia Rose was a real person who Susannah Melvoin knew growing up. All the details are taken from real life, except for Cynthia’s preferred breakfast, which was actually starfish and pee-pee. That was a little too much even for Prince, though.
It is awesome that you can embed interactive Noteflight scores in a web page, like so:
But for optimal music education results, I also want to be able to show that same example in MIDI piano roll view too. Imagine if the Noteflight embed included a pane that showed this:
Continue reading “Here is a web based music education tool that I wish existed”
Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove.
Let’s have a look! I transcribed some key sections. Continue reading “I Want You Back”
Klara Huebsch of the Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society was recently my host for a conversation about the Groove Pizza, music visualization, the health benefits of drumming, participatory music cultures, and antiracist music education. It’s a good one!
I mainly grew up in a classical radio type of household, but my folks had a couple of jazz albums too, including Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back.”
The melody is elegantly simple, and reveals greater depth with each listen. When I was in sixth grade, I was obsessed with this track. I listened to it over and over and over. I liked to sit and draw abstract geometric shapes and cartoon beings while I listened. I had no idea where to take this interest until years later. Evidently I had good taste as a kid! The tune is a great one, and the recording is deep in the pocket. I don’t love that 80s rubber-band-like upright bass pickup sound, but the groove is impeccable.
Continue reading “I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve”
I wrote a book with Will Kuhn and now it exists in real life!
You can buy it from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Powell’s, Apple Books, and many other places. The foreword is by Adam Neely.
Electronic Music School is a complete guide to starting and running a creative music technology program. We include many battle-tested project plans and a methodology for designing your own projects. We also talk about equipment and budgeting, advocacy, live performance, and a progressive philosophy of music education that ties it all together. The book is anchored around our belief that general music should be taught as an art class, where students create original music in styles that are personally meaningful to them. You should read it!
Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music.
I group scales into three broad categories: Major, Minor, and Neither. Major scales include a pitch that’s a major third above the root, and minor scales include a pitch that’s a minor third above the root. Makes sense! The “neither” category includes scales that have both major and minor thirds (e.g., altered, diminished) or just generally exist outside the major/minor universe (e.g., blues.) I hope you find it useful! And see also a list of typical uses for all these scales.
In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series of I and IV, and can only be approximated using instruments tuned to standard twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET). Let’s unpack what that means!
So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice.
Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans have filled the vacuum with endless mythologizing. I find it distasteful to read about him selling his soul to the devil to get good at guitar. It’s patronizing. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he got so good by just practicing a lot? Rather than engaging with all of that nonsense, I would prefer to focus on his music. Here’s the first song Robert Johnson ever recorded.
I have been doing a major overhaul of my blues tonality post. It now cites more literature and has a more logical structure. The post is my best attempt at a complete description of blues harmony, its history, and its role (or lack thereof) in music theory pedagogy. I hope you find it useful.
