This is a seemingly dry music theory topic, but it gave me an excuse to sing “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Fly Me To The Moon” over the instrumental to “I Will Survive”. Should I sing more on the podcast? Chord progressions on the circle of fifths part one by Ethan Hein The …
Continue reading “Circle of Fifths sequences on the pod (also me singing)”
I continue to work through the greatest hits of my classroom practice. It’s fun and easy making episodes using material that I have presented many times in many contexts, informed by student discussions. Eventually I will run out of this stuff and my pace will slow down significantly, but for now, the episodes are pretty …
I have written about the Funky Drummer break several times here before, but this podcast episode is my best explanation of it. The main thing that’s new is the connection between this break and Afro-Latin tresillo patterns. I also programmed a bunch of variations on the groove for comparison purposes. The name of this tune …
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Savelle was in my Song Factory class at the New School, and she just released her first EP. I could not be more excited for her, and I really dig these songs. Three by Savelle My favorite of the three is the bluesy opener, “Company.” I take no credit for any of this. Savelle came …
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In this episode, I use “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder (1973) as a jumping off point to contemplate the headache of naming notes and chords in keys with a lot of flats and sharps in them. The circle of fifths is a lie by Ethan Hein My struggles to learn “Don’t …
We’re coming up on blues melody day in aural skills class. I always like to do some close listening to Aretha Franklin for that session, especially her version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” I hadn’t previously done any analysis of it; we just listen and let it speak for itself. But I thought, this semester, …
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There are two kinds of embellishing tones, the ones from inside the key and the ones from outside. The outside ones are called chromatic embellishments, and that name is appropriate; you get the most color from careful application of the “wrong” notes.
I learned the terms “beginning-accented melody” and “end-accented melody” from The Musical Language of Rock by David Temperley. The terms mean what they sound like: a melodic phrase whose accent is either at its beginning or its end. This seems like the definition of a purely academic theory concept, but it turns out that end-accentedness …
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In a previous post, I listed examples of melodic suspensions. But I didn’t do a very good job of explaining how they work. So I will rectify that here.
This week in aural skills, we are covering embellishing tones. This topic is tough, because I can never remember the difference between an appoggiatura and an escape tone without looking it up, but it’s on the syllabus, so I have to try. In previous semesters, I have approached it by having students identify examples from …
