Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No. 1 – Prelude

I’m teaching melody in music theory class this month, and nobody wrote better melodies than Bach. If you want to learn how to use single note lines to imply chord changes and counterpoint, the prelude to his first cello suite is a whole textbook worth of wisdom for you. My favorite interpretation is by Mstislav Rostropovich.

Music supervisors in movies and television have run this prelude into the ground, as evidenced by Bach’s colossal IMDB page. Noteworthy usages include The Pianist, The West Wing, Netflix’s Daredevil, If I Stay, The Hangover Part II, and, uh, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. My personal favorite is in Master and Commander, when they arrive in the Galapagos Islands.

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Ben Shapiro has opinions about rap

Ben Shapiro is not a big rap fan. He expressed this opinion on Twitter a few years ago with his customary nuance.Ben Shapiro - rap isn't music

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Announcing the Theory aQWERTYon

A few years ago, the NYU Music Experience Design Lab launched a web application called the aQWERTYon. The name is short for “QWERTY accordion.” The idea is to make it as easy to play music on the computer keyboard as it is with the chord buttons on an accordion. The aQWERTYon maps scales to the keyboard so that there are no “wrong notes,” and so that each column of keys plays a chord. Yesterday, we launched a new version of the app, the Theory aQWERTYon. It visualizes the notes you’re playing on the chromatic circle in real time. Click the image to try it! (Be sure to whitelist it on your ad blocker or it won’t work.)

Theory aQWERTYon

In addition to playing the built-in instruments, you can also use the aQWERTYon as a MIDI controller for any DAW or notation program. Just set the input to the IAC bus (Windows users will need to install MidiOX before this will work.)

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Salsa in Central Park

Yesterday I went to a free concert by Johnny “Dandy” Rodriguez and his Dream Team by the Harlem Meer in Central Park. I don’t know a lot about salsa, but these guys sound to me like an excellent salsa band.

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Sound writing with my New School students

I just completed the first week of Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School. We began the semester with critical listening. Before having the students analyze recorded music, I had them warm up by doing some writing about the sound of a mundane environment. As it turns out, New School students are terrific and imaginative writers, and I thought I would share some excerpts of their work here.

The internal ear

The assignment: Choose a physical location, and describe its soundscape in 500-1000 words. List all of the sound sources you can and describe them in as much detail as possible. Describe your emotional reactions to these sounds individually and collectively. If you like, review the sounds as if they are a musical work.

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Donna Lee

Here’s a Charlie Parker recording that’s not widely known outside of jazz, but is absolutely foundational inside it:

This recording features a very young Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles later said that he wrote the tune, and that its copyright attribution to Charlie Parker was a record label error. I believe him. It sounds more like a devoted Charlie Parker fan emulating his style than something Parker himself would write.

I’m embarrassed to say that my first exposure to “Donna Lee” was almost certainly hearing it get butchered by Phish. Still, I have to give them credit for introducing bebop to a wider audience. One of my main motivations for learning to read music as a college student was so I could play “Donna Lee” out of the Real Book. I succeeded, eventually, but it took an incredibly long time, and I wasn’t able to flow through it steadily until many years later.

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RIP Godfried Toussaint

I was sad to learn about the recent death of Godfried Toussaint, whose work on the geometry of musical rhythm has been a major inspiration for me.

Godfried Toussaint

I never met Godfried, but I have read and re-read his work. His rhythm necklace diagrams were the direct inspiration for the Groove Pizza – I saw them and thought, I would love to have a drum programming interface like that.

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I Wanna Dance With Somebody

I was looking for some new acapellas to remix, and was delighted to come across Whitney Houston’s vocal stem from “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me).” The 808-cowbell-laden production has undeniable charm, but the vocals by themselves are the real truth.

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Jacob Collier’s four magical chords

Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.”

The most remarkable part of this arrangement comes between the third and fourth verses, when Collier modulates from the key of E to the key of G half-sharp. That’s the key which is halfway between G and G-sharp. Modulating there is a bananas thing to do!

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Remixing “A Day In The Life”

Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the company posted the stems online, and they remain in widespread circulation. (You can easily obtain them via a Google search.) This was a tremendous gift for people who teach production, songwriting and the history of music technology. It was also a gift for people whose preferred method of expressing their fandom is through remixing. I fall into both categories.

A few years ago, when I was first teaching myself controllerism, I went through the multitracks of “A Day In The Life” and sampled a bunch of loops from each stem: drums, bass, piano, guitar, orchestra, and vocals. I’m writing a book chapter right now about Ableton Live and the Push controller, so to help focus my thoughts, I figured I would load all these loops into a new session and see what I could make happen. I decided to limit myself only to material from the song, in the spirit of The Reflex. Here’s the result:

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