The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory

This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples

Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I have always used a lot of examples from Anglo-American pop, but it’s nice to be in a program that is committed to putting that music front and center. This raises a question, though: what is “popular” music theory? Isn’t music theory just music theory? Why should NYU create a whole alternative theory sequence for pop? The short answer is that Anglo-American popular music operates by very different rules and conventions than Western European tonal music.

It’s a cliche to say that American music is a combination of European harmony and African rhythm. However, a substantial amount of Anglo-American pop harmony is African-descended. The blues has especially strong African retentions. (It’s a problem that theory curricula are so heavily weighted toward harmony and voice leading. We need to include much more rhythm, form and timbre in theory class! But that is a discussion for another post.) You can understand the difference between blues harmony and Western European harmony by looking at the evolution of blues harmonica.

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C-flat and B-sharp

This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard!

In this post, I address the deeper mystery of the notes C-flat and B-sharp. Are these real notes?

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MusicRadar column on three songs from Brat by Charli XCX

I have now written three MusicRadar columns in a row on current pop smashes by women. This wasn’t planned; it’s just the way the songs of the summer have played out. I didn’t know much about Charli XCX before I wrote this, beyond the fact that she sang some hooks on some radio hits. I’m glad to have had a reason to dig into her music, she is delightful.

This fall I’m teaching theory and aural skills classes in NYU’s new popular music sequence, and I have a feeling these three songs are going to be making appearances.

Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic

I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several years, I bent notes because it sounded good and didn’t think too much about why. But the more I learned about Western music theory, the more mysterious the blues became. It’s hard enough to understand how a minor third could sound so right on top of a major chord; but then why should it sound even better to deliberately play an out-of-tune minor third? It’s not like every out-of-tune note sounds good in blues-based music. The Grateful Dead combine a lot of objectionably sour vocal harmony with Jerry’s deliciously sweet bent notes on guitar. What’s the difference, aside from intention?

I don’t have a definite explanation of the blues’ flexible use of certain pitches, and I certainly don’t know the best way to teach this idea. My approach is to present students with specific blue notes from well-known songs and see what we can figure out. James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” from 1965 is an especially clear example.

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F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation

As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and sometimes call it a diminished fifth? What difference does it make if they sound the same?

I had a major “aha” moment when I learned about the history of Western tuning systems, and found out that F-sharp and G-flat were originally two different and non-interchangeable notes. I have enjoyed seeing that same “aha” look on my students’ faces when I explain it to them. But tuning systems are hard to understand, and my explanation still requires a lot of refining. This post is one in a series of iterations.

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What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool

What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In a previous post, I examined a phrase from the studio version of “The Music Never Stopped”. In this post, I look at the intro to “Eyes of the World” from 11/11/1973. 

I’m not going to talk about “Eyes of the World” as a song; I’ll save that for another post. Instead, I’m only concerned with Jerry’s solo in the first minute. Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”

New book chapter with Toni Blackman

Publication alert! I co-wrote a book chapter about hip-hop in the music classroom with Toni Blackman, one of my major music education heroes and the central figure in my doctoral dissertation. It’s called “Building Hip-Hop Music Educators: Personal Reflections on Rap Songwriting in the Classroom.” It’s part of a new edited volume about hip-hop education that is freely available as a PDF, as all scholarly publications ought to be.

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High Time

The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, Workingman’s Dead, and American Beauty.

Workingman’s Dead is easily the rootsiest Dead album. It’s named in homage to “Workin’ Man Blues” by Merle Haggard. (Bob Weir got his guitar part in “Cumberland Blues” from this song.) While the tunes on Workingman’s Dead are not overtly spacy, some of them are still plenty weird. “High Time” is the weirdest one.

Helen De Cruz says it best: “What is happening with these chords???” What indeed. We will get to that below.

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Hobo Blues

Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we can learn from them. I am especially interested in examples that don’t follow the standard twelve bar blues form or use the I, IV and V chords. Too many music education resources boil the blues down to these tropes, and I want students to understand that the music is more stylistically diverse than that. For example, listen to “Hobo Blues” by John Lee Hooker, which he first recorded in 1949.

This song sounds like the blues, but it doesn’t use the twelve bar form or the IV and V chords. Does it even have a form or chords at all? It’s more like an open-ended drone. Hooker learned this style of playing from his stepfather William Moore, who was from Louisiana where the blues sounded different from the predominant style of the Mississippi Delta.

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New MusicRadar column about Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”

This one was assigned by my editor, and I went into the song more or less cold. I ended up liking the song, though maybe that’s because so many of my students adore Chappell Roan and I was inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe she’s just good!

Anyway, as the column evolves, I am glad that it isn’t just about me and my whims. (You get plenty of that here on this blog.) Having an incentive to pay attention to this kind of song keeps me young.