This is my curated collection of online music teaching, learning and creation resources. Use in good health.
Harmonica Meditation
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.
- Exhale completely.
- Put the harmonica to your mouth and take a deep breath all the way in, as slowly as you can. I recommend starting at the low (left) end of the harmonica and arpeggiating upwards, but you can play whichever notes you like.
- Exhale completely through the harmonica, as slowly as you can.
- Continue to inhale and exhale slowly and completely. Pay attention to the sound of the notes and chords, to their loudness, intonation, and timbre. If you can bend the notes or create articulations by tonguing or opening and closing your hands around the harmonica, do so.
- The piece ends on an inhale. Let the notes fade out gently as your lungs fill. When you take the harmonica away from your mouth and exhale, the piece is over.
RIP McCoy Tyner
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.
Metrical dissonance in the Gigue from Bach’s E minor English Suite
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”
Syncopation in Chopin
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:
The Amen Break of snobbery
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.
Let’s argue about this one weird chord in the Brahms Intermezzo in B-flat minor
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”
Flava In Ya Ear
It is my duty as a hipster dad to introduce my kids to all the classics of 90s rap, and they have been especially taken with this one.
We’ve been enjoying making up our own lyrics to the hook. First we kicked flava in ya nose, then ya mouth, then ya eye. From there we moved onto kicking all kinds of things into all kinds of places. My four year old daughter especially enjoys kicking boogers in ya face. It’s a truly versatile phrase.
What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?
Asaf Peres recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in “Let Me Love You” by Ariana Grande.
The Wraparound Leading Tone in @ArianaGrande ft. @LilTunechi – "Let Me Love You"
(it's really called a double leading tone, but I like wraparound better)@TBHITS @VictoriaMonet @jeremih #MrFranks pic.twitter.com/qVyY1BP7Nm— Top40 Theory (Asaf Peres) (@Top40Theory) February 17, 2020
When I went to listen to the song, I immediately heard all kinds of weird things in the rhythm: that the chords were falling on weak beats, that the downbeat was displaced, that the drum pattern was misaligned somehow. I wasn’t alone in hearing these things. Asaf was puzzled, since he was confident in his hearing. Finally, I put the tune into Ableton and carefully transcribed it. I was totally wrong! But in fairness to me, the song is a rhythmically unconventional one, especially its opening few bars. Continue reading “What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?”
Glenn Gould wanted me to make this remix
Glenn Gould thought people should make their own edits of classical recordings.
He explains this idea in greater depth here. I read it and thought, challenge accepted!