This semester I am once again teaching pop theory and aural skills at NYU. I have done some previous reflections on these classes. The students are undergrads, mostly studying instrumental and vocal performance, songwriting and music technology. They range in stylistic background from pop to rock to jazz to R&B to hip-hop to musical theater, and there …
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I just concluded my first semester teaching Advanced Popular Music Transcription in NYU’s new pop theory and aural skills sequence. The students transcribe recorded music into notation, and also analyze production techniques and timbre. Learning by ear is an essential skill for pop musicians. Even when you are using charts, accurate ones are rarely available. …
Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music …
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This year, in addition to teaching my first NYU pop music theory class, I also taught two semesters of pop aural skills. If you didn’t go through a university music program, you may not know what aural skills class involves. Traditionally, you identify chords and intervals by ear, practice sight-singing, and do dictation (meaning, you …
See also: my year in pop aural skills teaching This year I taught my first theory class in NYU’s new popular music sequence. It was not my first music theory class, or my first pop music class, but it was the first one in a university-level sequence dedicated specifically to pop. I think it mostly …
I haven’t done any culture war material lately, but Jason Yust recently published an article in the Journal of Music Theory with the title “Tonality and Racism“, and I couldn’t not respond. The arguments in the paper are relevant to my teaching life in NYU’s new and wonderful pop theory and aural skills sequence. These classes …
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Sometimes you find a song that is so full of clear examples of music theory concepts that you want to build your whole syllabus around it. The Allman Brothers version of “Stormy Monday”, which they adapted from Bobby Bland’s arrangement of a T-Bone Walker song, is a case in point: it has extended chords, augmented …
I needed a song with lots of secondary dominants in it for aural skills class, and I realized that Norah Jones’ adult-contemporary smash “Don’t Know Why” has a bunch of them. The song came out in 2002, though it could have been recorded at any time in the 50 years previous.
This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It’s so common, in fact, …
My theory students are going to be writing vocal harmonies for one of their assignments. To give them guidance, I will be talking through one possible approach to adding harmonies to “Shout” by Tears for Fears. Here’s the original song: Here’s the acapella. I’m not arguing that this song needs harmony vocals; it’s just a …
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