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 …
Tag Archives: rhythm
Flava In Ya Ear
It is my duty as a hipster dad to introduce my kids to all the classics of 90s rap, and they have been especially taken with this one. We’ve been enjoying making up our own lyrics to the hook. First we kicked flava in ya nose, then ya mouth, then ya eye. From there we …
What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?
Asaf Peres recently posted on Twitter about the chord progression in “Let Me Love You” by Ariana Grande. The Wraparound Leading Tone in @ArianaGrande ft. @LilTunechi – "Let Me Love You"(it's really called a double leading tone, but I like wraparound better)@TBHITS @VictoriaMonet @jeremih #MrFranks pic.twitter.com/qVyY1BP7Nm — Top40 Theory (Asaf Peres) (@Top40Theory) February 17, 2020 …
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Teaching note values
Western music notation is a graph of pitch (on the vertical axis) and time (on the horizontal axis.) It’s mostly self-explanatory on the pitch axis, but it’s harder to understand on the time axis. It helps if you visualize your rhythms on a circle, like the Groove Pizza does. Everything I talk about in this …
Bach Chaconne – Gimme the Lute mix
While investigating the Bach Chaconne, I found this beautiful lute performance by Hopkinson Smith. It’s enlightening to compare Smith’s performance to Moran Wasser playing the Chaconne on 11-string guitar. The lute is less bright and resonant than guitar, but I like Smith’s playing better, he’s not as melodramatic. I couldn’t find any video of him playing …
Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante
Mozart is mostly not to my taste, but there is no denying that the man could write a melody. My favorite melody of his is the one from the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. I like Daniel Barenboim’s interpretation the best; everyone else plays it too fast for me. …
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RIP Godfried Toussaint
I was sad to learn about the recent death of Godfried Toussaint, whose work on the geometry of musical rhythm has been a major inspiration for me. I never met Godfried, but I have read and re-read his work. His rhythm necklace diagrams were the direct inspiration for the Groove Pizza – I saw them …
Developing an intro-level music theory course
In the fall of 2019, I started teaching Fundamentals of Western Music at the New School’s Eugene Lang College. It combines the usual Music Theory I content with a broader, more ethnomusicological perspective that brings in various forms of pop, non-Western musics, and (most excitingly for me) the blues. It’s an existing course, but I …
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The Groove Pizzeria
For his NYU music technology masters thesis, Tyler Bisson created a web app called Groove Pizzeria, a polyrhythmic/polymetric extension of the Groove Pizza. Click the image to try it for yourself. Note that the Groove Pizzeria is still a prototype, and it doesn’t yet have the full feature set that the Groove Pizza does. …
Kumbaya
When you look up “Kumbaya” on Urban Dictionary, you get an adjective meaning “blandly pious and naively optimistic.” This is the sense in which Fox News often uses the word to make fun of bleeding heart liberals like me. I learned the song from numerous earnest white folk singers, many of whom learned it from …