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Composing in the classroom
The hippest music teachers help their students create original music. But what exactly does that mean? What even is composition? In this post, I take a look at two innovators in music education and try...
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Musical simples: Come Together
Presumably you’re familiar with this song? If not, run out and get Abbey Road and don’t deprive yourself for another minute. As far as I’m concerned, you can have Revolver and Sergeant Pepper and...
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Musical simples: Dear Prudence
John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was the best song he wrote for the Beatles, and I’m inclined to agree. “Dear Prudence” combines major and minor sounds, so there is no standard scale...
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Musical simples: Day Tripper
Many of the Beatles’ most memorable ideas are variations on boilerplate riffs from rock, country, blues or R&B. The riff from “Day Tripper” derives from boogie-woogie. John Lennon cited Bobby...
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Musical simples: Hey Jude
The end section of “Hey Jude” is longer than most entire pop songs, a long gradual build on a single simple loop. The chord structure is the old classic rock standby, I-♭VII-IV-I. The progression comes...
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Real vs hyperreal vs surreal
You can put all recorded music techniques and gestures into three categories: realist, hyperrealist, and surrealist. These categories have soft boundaries that broadly overlap. Nevertheless, I find...
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Chord pizzas
The Groove Pizza uses geometry to help visualize rhythms. The MusEDLab is planning to create a similar tool for visualizing music theory by merging the aQWERTYon with the Scale Wheel. When you put the...
View ArticleSimple songs
I’m interested in a particular kind of pop song: mainstream-ish tracks that are so minimal in their melodic or lyrical content that they barely qualify as “songs,” yet manage to still be musically...
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Remixing “A Day In The Life”
Back in 2009, Harmonix came out with The Beatles: Rock Band. In order to prepare the sound files for the game, the company needed the original multitrack stems for fifty Beatles songs. Someone at the...
View ArticleAn intro to counterpoint
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...
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Dear Prudence
John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was his best song. I’m inclined to agree. I have spent more time playing and remixing this tune than anything else in the Beatles catalog, and I...
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Eleanor Rigby
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...
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Songs vs Grooves
Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves....
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Groove harmony
Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the...
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Groove melodies
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write...
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Teaching songwriting to music education students
This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write...
View ArticleBrad Mehldau plays the Beatles
Brad Mehldau has a new album out of solo piano arrangements of Beatles songs (plus one David Bowie song for some reason.) It’s a good one! Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles by...
View ArticleShe’s Leaving Home
My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”,...
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Where do jazz standards come from?
My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz. There are numerous sources of jazz standards. In...
View ArticleFor No One
The Beatles were not always a rock band, especially not when it came to the Paul songs. This is a frequently cited example of baroque pop, a cousin of “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” Paul is...
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