Aside from Bach, Chopin is my favorite dead white European male composer. He isn’t as overtly “jazzy” as Debussy or Ravel, but his music shares many of the qualities of jazz that I like: miniature-scale forms densely packed with rhythmic and harmonic excitement, in the service of organic-sounding melodies. Chopin’s Nocture Op 9 No 1 …
Continue reading “Jazzy harmony and crazy tuplets in Chopin’s Nocturne Op 9 No 1”
First, some niche Twitter comedy: Twelve-tone equal temperament is socialism, Make Intonation Just Again — ethanhein.bsky.social (@ethanhein) June 26, 2020 The Well-Tempered Clavier is a book of JS Bach compositions for keyboard instruments in each of the twelve major and twelve minor keys. The name refers to Bach’s preferred tuning system, which made it possible …
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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 …
Continue reading “Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation”
In both music theory and music tech classes, I ask the students to pick songs and analyze their structure. This semester, one student chose “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. She had a hard time with it–understandably! It’s not a complicated song, but it is an unconventional one. In this post, I’ll talk through the tune’s …
Struggling to comprehend Bach has been a reliable treatment for my quarantine blues. I’m guiding my listening with scholarly articles about his use of rhythm. Joseph Brumbeloe wrote a good one: “Patterns and Performance Choices in Selected Perpetual-Motion Movements by J. S. Bach.” By “perpetual motion,” Brumbeloe means unbroken streams of uniform note values. In …
Continue reading “Perpetual motion in the Presto from Bach’s G minor Violin Sonata”
I have been creating a series of beat-driven remixes of canonical classical works. I have mostly done this for my own enjoyment, because I like hearing the pieces with some groove to them. But I also sense that there might be pedagogical applications for this method as well. I finally found a good example: the …
Continue reading “Rhythmic ambiguity in the Bach E major partita prelude”
In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, …
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Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …
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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 …
I’m trying to get better at understanding classical music, ideally without doing too much Schenkerian analysis. I can hunt for cadences as well as anyone who’s been to music school, and I understand how important they are as structural elements in the Western canon. But there’s more to this music than harmony. It has rhythm …
