I wrote this explainer for my New School students; maybe you will find it useful too. The white keys on the piano don’t just have to play C major. If you play the white keys over a droning or repeated A, you get a very different-sounding scale. It has a few different names: the A …
Tag Archives: Bartók
The diminished scale
When I want my music to sound mysterious, the diminished scale is a reliable tool in the harmonic toolkit. It worked for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and it can work for you!
Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation
Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left …
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An intro to counterpoint
Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it. But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever …
How do key signatures work?
Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, …
Modern classical techno
One of my Montclair State students recently did a class presentation on Venetian Snares, the stage name of highbrow electronica producer Aaron Funk. The track uses samples from the first movement of Béla Bartók’s fourth string quartet, accompanied by shuffled slices of the Amen break. It sounds to me like an EDM artist trying to …