Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher

In this paper, I discuss a rap cypher held during a session of NYU’s CORE Music Program on March 3, 2018. A cypher is a group performance where rappers take turns performing improvised verses. Freestyling is to rap what jam sessions are to jazz: an improvisational form that demands both technical proficiency and a relaxed, casual confidence. I chose the cypher as the subject of ethnographic study because it crystallizes so much of what I love about rap generally. Freestyle rap in particular is an underappreciated art. While hip-hop is the most popular genre of music in the United States (Nielsen, 2018), and possibly in the world (Hooton, 2015), the American music academy does not afford it much respect. I have heard a demoralizingly large number of musicians and educators opine that rap is not music at all. While I do not believe that rap needs academic validation, it is important to me that my fellow educators understand and appreciate the beauty of this music, so if they will not embrace it, they might at least do less to impede it.

Few rap haters will admit to being motivated by racial or class animus. Instead, they point to rap’s supposed lack of melody, or the programmed and sampled beats. Along with electronic dance music, rap in its instrumental aspect is the most repetitive popular form in American history, and schooled musicians are socialized to be contemptuous of repetition (McClary, 2004). Improvisation likewise has a low status in academic settings, because spontaneous musical expression supposedly has less significance than composed works (Nettl, 1974, p. 3). However, closer engagement with improvised rap quickly reveals its depth. For example, the predictability of the beats is a necessity to support the complex play of text, pitch, rhythm and timbre in the emcees’ flow. Only by evaluating the music by its own value system can we recognize its beauty. Continue reading “Participant ethnography of a hip-hop cypher”

RIP Cecil Taylor

When I was nineteen, I was flipping channels on TV late at night, and I stumbled on this:

I had no idea what I was seeing, but I was spellbound. I still can’t exactly verbalize what this music means to me, but I know it means something.

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Big thoughts on music tech

A student interviewed me for a class project on “the impact of music technology on the music industry.” Her questions and my answers follow.

How did you get interested in music technology?

I got interested in music technology the first time I touched an instrument. So did you! I don’t think we should even have a subject called “music technology”, because it properly includes every aspect of music other than unaccompanied singing. Saxophones and pianos are no more “natural” or non-technological than computers. For that reason, I don’t do much teaching about technology in class; I teach the creative processes of music production, specifically, recorded music of the African diasporic vernacular tradition, what the music academy calls “popular.” I talk about that because other college courses don’t, and I think it’s important for music educators to know how to make the music that their students like. I have the freedom to do that because there is no standard way to teach music tech – when I was hired, I was told to pretty much do whatever I saw fit.

Bouncy Synth - Ableton Arrange View

I got interested in recording technology when I first tried recording myself with a tape recorder at age six. I got interested in learning how to do it well when I was in college, and my folk band went into a studio. We spent a bunch of money and got back a result that was so-so. It became clear that my money would be better spent on a computer, an interface, some software and a couple of microphones. This was in the late 90s, when the price of all of those things was falling dramatically, and it was becoming possible to get professional-sounding results in your apartment without spending tens of thousands of dollars. At first I was only interested in recording voices and live instruments. I started programming drums, samples, and synth parts as placeholders for “real” instruments. But then I got interested in making those sound better, because so much of the music I like uses synths and samples. The world helped push me in that direction, since there’s a lot more demand for producers than for guitarists. Continue reading “Big thoughts on music tech”

Music for practicing scales

Are you trying to learn how to improvise with scales and patterns, but finding it hard to make yourself practice? Do yourself a favor, and practice over actual music. A student asked me to make him a playlist of harmonically static music that’s good for practicing over. I thought I would share it with everyone.

The music in this post is perfect for working out scales. Each track stays in a particular key or mode for long stretches of time, and has a slow or medium tempo. You can dig deep into the scales associated with each one without needing to worry about form or rapid chord changes. Click the links to load the aQWERTYon set to the appropriate key and scale.

The Temptations

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – B-flat Dorian or blues

Miles Davis

“Shhh Peaceful” – D Mixolydian (or blues, or major, or really anything)
“In A Silent Way/It’s About That Time” – slow part is E major (or Lydian, or blues), funky part is F Mixolydian (or blues, or Dorian)

“He Loved Him Madly” – C Phrygian (or blues, or natural minor, or any minor scale)

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Hip-hop as a tool for hip-hop ethnography

I believe in using music as a tool for analyzing and discussing music. To that end, I wanted to try interviewing a musician about a song of theirs, and then do a remix of the song that incorporates the interview. A rapper named Anna Diorio a.k.a. Happy Accident volunteered to participate. We discussed the writing and production of her song “A Man’s World.”

https://soundcloud.com/thetruthfairy/a-mans-world

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Chord pizzas

The Groove Pizza uses geometry to help visualize rhythms. The MusEDLab is planning to create a similar tool for visualizing music theory by merging the aQWERTYon with the Scale Wheel. When you put the twelve pitch classes in a circle, you can connect the dots between different notes in a chord or scale to form shapes. My hypothesis is that seeing these shapes along with hearing the notes will help people learn music theory more easily. In this post, I’ll talk through some concept images.

First, let’s look at two different ways to represent the pitch classes on a circle. On the left is the chromatic circle, showing the notes in the order of pitch height (the way they are on a piano keyboard.) On the right is the circle of fifths. These two circles have an interesting relationship: the circle of fifths is the involute of the chromatic circle. Notice that C, D, E, G-flat, A-flat and B-flat are in the same places on both circles, while the other six notes trade places across the circle. Pretty cool!

The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

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Dancing to Michael Jackson with my kids

I have a longstanding musical relationship with Michael Jackson. There’s nothing remarkable about that; many people do. Like the rest of my age cohort, Michael entered my consciousness with Thriller in the early 1980s. Aside from a period in my teens and young adulthood, he has rarely been out of my ears since. The relationship took on a new significance when my kids got interested in him, though “interested” is not the right word to describe their obsession. Milo, at age five, will listen to “Beat It” or “Billie Jean” on endless repeat for literally hours at a time. Bernadetta, age two, asks for “Beat It” by name—it’s one of two song titles she knows, along with “Yellow Submarine.” At her second birthday party, she insisted on dancing to “Beat It” rather than opening her presents.

Michael Jackson by Paul Bedard

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Hip-hop teaches confidence lessons

I’m working on a paper about music education and hip-hop, and I’m going to use this post to work out some thoughts.

My wife and I spent our rare date night going to see Black Panther at BAM. It was uplifting. Many (most?) black audience members came dressed in full Afrofuturistic splendor. A group of women in our section were especially decked out:

Black Panther audience members at BAM

I was admiring their outfits and talking about how I wasn’t expecting such an emotional response to the movie. One of the women said it was as big a deal for them as the election of Barack Obama in 2008. I know representation is important, but this seems like it’s more than just seeing black faces on the movie screen. Black Twitter is talking about how this movie is different because it isn’t about overcoming historical pain or present-day hardship; it’s about showing black people as powerful, rich, technologically advanced, and above all, serenely confident.

Black Panther is heavily overdetermined, like all superhero movies. But I’m especially interested in the way we could read it as a metaphor for music, with the Wakandans as representing African musical traditions and Eric Killmonger as representing the global rise of hip-hop. I see Killmonger this way not only because he’s American, but because so many of his qualities and mannerisms remind me of the role of hip-hop in the public imagination. He’s stylish, effortlessly charismatic, and seemingly indifferent to anyone else’s approval. He’s funny, too, not in the warm and good-natured way that Shuri is, but in a more aggressive and sarcastic way. He’s both arrogant and vulnerable, using implacable cool to conceal deep hurt. And he wants to remake the world by fomenting black revolution, by any means necessary. The Wakandans, meanwhile, are uncomplicatedly strong, self-possessed, and at ease with their own power. But they are also withdrawn from the world, fearing that getting involving in other people’s struggles will destroy what makes their culture so unique and beautiful.

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Real vs hyperreal vs surreal

You can put all recorded music techniques and gestures into three categories: realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist. These categories have soft boundaries that broadly overlap. Nevertheless, I find them to be a useful way to organize my thinking about sonic aesthetics.

Sullivan Fellows - beatmaking with Pro Tools Continue reading “Real vs hyperreal vs surreal”

Junto trios

In the past three weeks, thanks to the magic of the Disquiet Junto, I’ve participated in the creation of three musical trios with six strangers from the internet. Here’s a family tree of the nine tracks we all did:

Junto trios

Artist names are in black, “part one” tracks are in blue, “part two” tracks are in red, and “part three” tracks are in green. We followed Marc Weidenbaum’s prompts for part one, part two, and part three. Hear all the music we all made below.

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