I’m delighted to announce that my new online music theory collaboration with Soundfly is live. It’s called Unlocking the Emotional Power of Chords, and it gives you a practical guide to harmony for creators of contemporary pop, R&B, hip-hop, and EDM. We tie all the abstract music theory concepts to real-world musical usages, showing how you can …
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Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides Pager, Devah. (2007). MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Page 21 of Pager’s book includes this chart, showing annual prison admissions for drugs by race in the United States. In the 1980s, we imprisoned roughly the same …
Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides. Images of interesting intersections from various sources. Hill, C. P., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality.
One of my favorite guest verses in all of hip-hop is the one that Chance The Rapper does on Kanye West’s beautiful “Ultralight Beam.” The song is built around an eight bar loop. (See this post for an analysis of the chord progression.) Chance’s verse goes through the loop five times, for a total of …
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Music education in American colleges and universities focuses almost entirely on the traditions of Western European aristocrats during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known conventionally as “common practice music.” This focus implies that upper-class European-descended musical tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance …
Public-facing note-taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott This week, I’m taking a look at two chapters from a new book on the red-hot topic of artistic citizenship, the social responsibility of artists and arts educators.
Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.
Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving …
Lisa Stulberg started off Culture Of Learning class this morning with some Hamilton. She wants us to learn how to write, and Lin-Manuel Miranda is her current source of writerly inspiration.
I’m taking a sociology class called Learning Of Culture with Lisa Stulberg. It could just as easily be called Culture Of Learning, since it views school as just one cultural setting among many. Our first assignment was to read Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I agree with Toni Morrison’s cover blurb. After …
