This fall, I am teaching Technology in Music Education at Western Illinois University. The students are in-service music teachers who are working toward masters degrees. Here’s my syllabus.
I have left out administrative details and university boilerplate. Feel free to use any of this as you see fit, but if you do, please tell me, I’m always interested to hear.
Continue reading “Technology in Music Education – updated syllabus”
Is this the coolest pre-Revolver Beatles song? In terms of notes on the page, it very well could be.
My daughter and I managed to sing the harmony parts together the other night. She has a good ear for a seven year old, but also, the harmonies in that song are so clear and intuitive, it’s like they want to help you sing themselves.
I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!
The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.
I am always on the lookout for clear examples of blue thirds, pitches in between the standard equal-tempered major and minor thirds. I heard Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” recently, and the vocal melody grabbed my ear. (Be advised that the first verse uses the n-word.)
You can hear the pitches in the vocal melody even more clearly in the acapella.
I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”
That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.
I just finished my Groove Theories book proposal and sent it out, that was about twenty years of very slow work followed by two weeks of very fast work. So fingers crossed on that. I included two sample chapters, one on blues tonality, and one on swing. For the swing chapter, I wanted to find examples of the same piece of music played with and without swing for ease of comparison. In class, I usually play “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more than change the time feel; he also changes the instrumentation and structure. I wanted to find an example where the same music repeated identically with and without swing. The problem is that so far as I can tell, no such piece of music exists. But then I realized that it would be easy to make this piece of music myself, by warping something out in Ableton Live and applying different groove settings.
As my older kid’s Bowie obsession continues, he is digging deeper into the corners of the catalog and finding songs that I hadn’t even heard of. This week we’re learning “Absolute Beginners”, which Bowie wrote for the movie of the same name.
The song is as richly weird as all Bowie songs are. The instrumentation is mostly standard eighties rock, except for the horn section, which is one trumpeter and six (!) saxophonists. I learned from the Bowie Bible that Bowie wanted a backing vocalist who sounded “like a shopgirl”. Session guitarist Kevin Armstrong recommended his younger sister Janet, who had never sung professionally in a studio before. Knowing that makes me feel a little warmer toward her fairly awkward performance.
My older kid continues to be deep into Bowie, and has been learning “Ashes to Ashes” on piano. This tune has not been a favorite of mine historically; as a young person, I found it hard to connect to its carsick decadence. However, the kid adores it, so I’m giving it more of a chance. It’s certainly easier to relate to as a middle-aged guy with a lot of regrets. The song is surprisingly complicated and weird for a number one UK hit! Also, the music video was the most expensive ever made to that point:
The most distinctive aspect of “Ashes to Ashes” is right in its first second, that freaky piano sound. Producer Tony Visconti wanted a Wurlitzer, but there wasn’t one in the building, so as a substitute, he ran an acoustic piano through an Eventide Instant Flanger. The part is played by Roy Bittan from the E Street Band, who was recording The River with Bruce Springsteen in the studio next door at the Power Station. The fake strings are played by Chuck Hammer on a Roland GR-500 guitar synth. Carlos Alomar plays regular guitar, George Murray plays the funky slap bass, Dennis Davis plays the herky-jerky drum part, and Tony Visconti plays assorted hand percussion. Andy Clark added synth textures on a Minimoog and a Yamaha CS-80 later in the recording process.
Over the weekend I went with the family to see the newly remastered 1973 David Bowie concert film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The picture and sound quality are uneven at best, but Bowie is such a spellbinding performer that it doesn’t matter. One of the high points is his performance of this banger.
Like all the great Bowie songs of the era, this superficially sounds like a regular rock song, but it has a lot of peculiar songwriting and arrangement touches. Bowie plays acoustic guitar, but also saxophone and pennywhistle. Mick Ronson plays electric guitar and piano, and also wrote the string arrangement. Trevor Bolder plays bass and Woody Woodmansey plays drums.
In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.
I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.
