Brokedown Palace

My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic:

For me, “Brokedown Palace” represents the high point of the Dead’s acoustic folkie side. On American Beauty, it comes right after “Ripple”, which is better known and is more of a singalong standard. I love “Ripple” too, but its lyrics aren’t about much of anything. “Brokedown Palace” has actual feelings in it. But I can see why it isn’t such a campfire song: it’s harder to play, and it’s in the not-very-folk-friendly key of F.

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Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

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Kicking out the JAMS

That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. Email me if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF.

Pieces vs Songs vs Grooves

In preparation for making a bunch of new YouTube videos, I have been thinking about Anne Danielsen’s distinction between songs and grooves. It’s a useful scheme for thinking about pop, but it doesn’t cover everything in Western music. We need a third category for linear through-composed music. So here’s my proposal: all of the music in our culture falls into three big overlapping categories: pieces, songs, and grooves.

  • A piece is linear: a series of non-repeating events that occur in a specific order.
  • A groove is circular: a short cell that repeats an indefinite number of times, without any larger-scale structure.
  • A song is in between: a linear arrangement of circular elements.

The categories are not perfectly distinct. Think more in terms of a continuum. On one extreme, you have total circularity, an infinite loop of a breakbeat or drum machine pattern. On the other extreme, you have total linearity, a serialist composition without any repetition at all. All Western music lies somewhere on this continuum. (All other music probably does too, but I don’t know enough about everyone else’s culture to be able to speak confidently about it.)

 

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Chain of Fools

“Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin is a song I loved for many years just for listening and enjoying, but then I started to love it even more as a music theory teaching example. It’s emblematic of blues tonality, one-chord changes, and groove structure.

The released version is edited down from its original arrangement, which is longer and has a free-rhythm blues intro:

Don Covay wrote “Chain of Fools” for Otis Redding, but producer Jerry Wexler thought Aretha would be a better fit. The tremolo guitar on the intro is by Joe South. (He’s also the bass player on Blonde on Blonde!) Jimmy Johnson, a ubiquitous session cat, plays the other guitar part. Spooner Oldham plays Wurly, Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Cissy Houston is one of the backup singers. That is a lot of musicianship in one room!

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Oye Como Va

Santana’s recording of “Oye Como Va” is one of the most outrageous grooves I’ve ever heard. David Welna describes it as “a Cuban cha-cha composed by a Puerto Rican New Yorker and performed by a Mexican immigrant and his San Francisco rock band.” It’s red-hot from its opening seconds. As the organ starts the montuno, someone in the band says “Brrrrrr, sabor”, meaning flavor, and that is definitely the word.

The song is a cover of a 1950s cha-cha-chá by Tito Puente.

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Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor

A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome.

Bach got the first half of the theme from André Raison’s Trio en Passacaile from Premier livre d’orgue. He took it a lot further out, though.

Before we go any deeper into the music, let’s talk about this instrument. Each pipe in a pipe organ plays a single note with a particular timbre. There are multiple pipes for each note, each of which produces a different blend of overtones. The knobs all around the keyboards on the organ are called stops, and they activate and deactivate different banks of pipes to produce different timbres. A big organ will have multiple keyboards, one of which is a set of foot pedals, and each keyboard controls its own array of banks of pipes. Furthermore, each keyboard can have different stop settings, effectively making each one a separate instrument. If you think about it, that makes a pipe organ the mechanical equivalent of a modular analog synthesizer.

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What if the Bach Chaconne was modal jazz?

As I struggle my way through the Bach Chaconne on guitar, I’m having to work around the fact that I am great at music theory but terrible at note reading. So before I could play the piece, I had to completely understand it and be able to feel it by ear. The only way I could make the score useful to me was to go through the entire thing and write in jazz-style chord symbols. I know that this approach is “wrong,” because Bach didn’t think about chords as independently existing entities in this way, but it has still helped me get the piece under my fingers. Another “incorrect” but practically useful way for me to think about the piece is as a collection of scales and modes.

The scales approach can not explain everything that happens in the Chaconne. There are a few places (marked pink in the video) where the harmony emerges out of chromatic voice-leading that can’t be meaningfully described in terms of scales. Still, those moments are infrequent, and otherwise the scales approach has been very helpful.

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Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne

You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this):

This journey has been one long reward for the obsessive-compulsive side of my personality. As of this writing, I can stumble through the whole piece, and can get through the first half in a way that sounds almost musical. If you want to try too, here’s a violin score. Also, here are measures 81 through 117 of the Chaconne from Bach’s manuscript:

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Music Ed Tech Talk with Will and me

The current episode of Robby Burns’ podcast features Will Kuhn and myself talking about our book, our philosophy of music education, and our opinions about Star Trek. We talk a lot about Star Trek at the beginning. If you are not interested in Star Trek, feel free to skip ahead.