You kids like the wrong music

I saw this image posted to a music education group on Facebook. The caption was something like, “Typical middle school/high school student.” I’ll leave the poster anonymous, because I’m sure they meant well.

contempt

Let me offer a translation of the translation: “I, the maker of this image, think that kids should enjoy music with tempo variation, triple meter, no groove, and long orchestral forms. I loathe pop music and can’t imagine why a person might enjoy it, so I condescendingly presume that the kids are being suckered in by marketing and image, and that they’re too lazy and dumb to pay attention. Furthermore, not only are the kids enjoying the wrong things, their listening preferences are performing sexual violence against the arts.” That’s a lot of anger for an internet meme! Let’s unpack.

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Ethan’s Trax

Ethan’s Trax is an iTunes playlist I maintain that includes all of the music I’ve ever recorded. Well, more accurately, it’s all of the music that I care to be reminded of. I haven’t included every draft and dead end. But if a track has any artistic or sentimental value whatsoever to me, it’s in Ethan’s Trax.

Ethan's Trax

As of this writing, the playlist contains 477 “songs.” That’s a cumulative one day, thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes and fifty-three seconds worth of music. My self-described genres include: Blues, Classical (General), Electronic, Experimental, Folk, Funk, Hip-Hop, Jazz (Vocal), Mashup, Pop, R&B/Soul, Rock, Showtunes, and Soundtracks/Scores. The Electronic category is substantially bigger than all of the others combined. The recent high points are here:

The question is, how much of this music is actually “mine”?

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Musical simples – Possibly Maybe

I’ve said it before and will say it again: Björk is the best thing to happen to contemporary music theory education. No matter what weird scale you’re trying to teach, she’s used it in a catchy, memorable tune. “Possibly Maybe” uses two weird scales: Lydian mode, in the A section (the verses), and melodic minor scale, in the B section (the “chorus” and the long outtro).

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Musical simples – Star Wars

John Williams’ Star Wars score owes a lot to the heroic symphonies of his favorite nineteenth century German composers, from Beethoven through Wagner. The main title theme is as Germanic as it gets, a straightforward military march on the B-flat major scale.

star-wars-circles

Like all great pop hooks, this one is simple, but it isn’t dumb. It’s a four-bar phrase, three of which are almost identical.

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Victor Wooten teaches music teaching

Victor Wooten is an absurdly proficient bassist best known for his work with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. There was a period in my life when the Flecktones’ music was my favorite thing in the world. That period is long behind me, but I have a lingering fondness for their amiably nerdy sound. Recently, I came across a TED talk that Vic gave, and it’s a good one.

Vic’s experience doesn’t necessarily generalize. Most of us aren’t born into families of professional musicians. Still, his central message applies: we do a much better job teaching language than teaching music, and we barely “teach” language at all. We learn to talk by being around other people while they talk, and by doing it badly a lot without anyone correcting us. Eventually, through real-life practice, we iron out the technical kinks, find our own voice, and in the process, barely even notice that we’re learning. What if we learned music this way? It would probably be more effective.

Vic’s wisdom about music education is undeniable. What about the wisdom contained in his actual music? On this, my feelings are mixed. If you aren’t familiar with Vic’s playing, here’s a representative sampling.

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Musical simples: Stir It Up

The I-IV-V chord progression is one of the cornerstones of Western music, uniting everything from Mozart to Missy Elliott. Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up” is as clear and concise an introduction to I-IV-V as you could ask for.

The song uses three chords: A, D, and E. They’re shown in the diagram below as turquoise, blue, and pink lines respectively.

stir-it-up-chords

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Musical simples: Army Of Me

Björk did the music theory world a huge favor by writing a pop hit entirely in Locrian mode, since it’s really hard to find a good real-world example of it otherwise.

You don’t see too many melodies written entirely, or even partially, in Locrian mode. It’s not a friendly scale. That mostly has to do with its fifth degree. In a typical Western scale, the fifth note is seven semitones above the root (or five semitones below, same thing.) In the key of C, that note is G. Almost all scales starting on C will have a G in them somewhere. But not Locrian. It has the note on either side of G, but not G itself.

army-of-me-circles

This is confusing to the Western listener. So confusing, in fact, that it’s hard to even hear C Locrian as having a C root at all. Depending on the phrasing, it quickly starts feeling like D-flat major, or A-flat Mixolydian, or B-flat natural minor, all of which are way more stable.

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Musical Simples: Once In A Lifetime

“Once In A Lifetime” is a simple but remarkable tune based on a simple but remarkable scale: the major pentatonic.

Like its cousin the minor pentatonic scale, major pentatonic is found in just about every world musical culture. It’s also incredibly ancient. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a paleontologist plays an unmistakeable major pentatonic scale on a replica of a 35,000 year old flute made from a vulture bone.

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Musical Simples: Superstition

If you had to explain funk to a visitor from outer space, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” would be a great place to start.

Aside from the refrains at the end of each verse, the entire tune consists of variations on a single two-bar clavinet riff on the E-flat minor pentatonic scale. The scale might have a daunting name, but it’s extremely easy on the piano: just play the black keys.

superstition-circles

The minor pentatonic scale is found in almost all world musical cultures. It’s no great mystery why everyone likes it: you can play the five notes in any order and any combination and nothing will ever sound bad. Notice that the scale notes are right next to each other on the circle of fifths above. Each note shares a lot of its constituent overtones with its neighbor, so it’s no wonder they all feel so closely related to each other.

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Here’s what’s cooking with the NYU MusEDLab

I’m a proud member of the NYU Music Experience Design Lab, a research group that crosses the disciplines of music education, technology, and design. Here’s an overview of our many ongoing projects.

MusEDLab logo

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