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 …
Continue reading “What is going on in this Ariana Grande song?”
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 …
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 …
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. …
Continue reading “Remixing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 – Andante”
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 …
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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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. …
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 …
This video recently made the rounds on Facebook: I was thinking about “Clair de Lune” and how strange and complicated the rhythm is. I was humming it to myself and couldn’t figure out where the downbeats were. I have previously used Ableton Live to help me learn a classical piece aurally, so I figured I …
Continue reading “Learning Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” with Ableton Live”
See also: the saddest chord progression ever. And also check out this deep dive into the groove of “I Want You Back.” We customarily think of descending melodies and chord progressions as being sad–they call it the “lament bass” for a reason. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the happiest song of all …
