First day of popular music theory at NYU! I have taught this material many times but never as part of a standard theory sequence, and am very happy to have the opportunity to be doing it. My section is mostly vocal performance and music business majors, with a few music tech people sprinkled in. Their prior music theory learning experiences do not seem to have been positive ones.

Something valuable I learned from hip-hop and dance music producers: put a loop on and let it run, then go about your business while it plays for a few hours. You would be amazed by what you discover. The first time I heard that someone literally just listened to a two-bar breakbeat for several hours while doing things around the house, I thought it was nutty. But I tried it, and you very quickly pass through boredom into a wonderful meditative state.

I treated myself to a copy of Fundamentals of Guitar by Miles Okazaki. I have some feelings about this book. milesokazaki.com/fundamentals-o… First things first, the book is wonderful and beautifully designed, and it accomplishes its goals with great clarity and depth. Its goals are unusual, though.

"Fast Car" is a strange and cool song when you dig in there. The first chord in the loop is D, but Tracy Chapman never sings the note D in the verses, it's strictly A major pentatonic. But then in "remember when we were driving", the "mem" is finally a D, and it's like a firework I don't think D appears in the melody after that, either

Getting thrown unexpectedly into aural skills teaching has been an adventure. It raises a profound question for someone teaching this in a popular music context: how much sight-singing should we expect? Because in real life, pop musicians do not do this at all. It's all by ear. So I, as a very adept rock musician and so-so jazz musician, can pick up a melody or chord progression almost immediately from hearing it. Learning it off the page will take me a long time. This is especially because... it's never necessary. Audio is always available.

Even if it were true that pop is stuck on I-IV-V (it never has been), that is not automatically a recipe for lack of harmonic interest. Listen closely to "Call Me Maybe", it's all I, IV, V and vi under a diatonic melody, but the melody conflicts with the chords constantly.

https://twitter.com/n_keivan/status/1749196458400575661

The very first thing that happens in the chorus is that the vocal melody arpeggiates a G chord over a C chord in the instrumental tracks. Mozart could never.

If you are following this discourse from outside the music academy, you should be aware that the word "pop" means something different in a university music department than it does elsewhere.

https://twitter.com/ethanhein/status/1748709278083424303

In the academic context, "popular" music usually refers to all popular music for the past hundred years at least: ragtime, blues, jazz, showtunes, rock, R&B, hip-hop, and yes, current top-40 pop.

Now NYU gives music students the option to do pop-oriented music theory and aural skills core classes, and there has been some predictable grumbling about it. "Of course everybody is signing up for the pop classes, they think they are easier." But yesterday the theory chair was cheerfully explaining how the pop classes are actually harder - they move fast and cover a huge amount of material.

I am committed to at least mentioning the basis of Western tuning in just intonation to my intro music theory kids. I don't expect them to retain any details or do any math, I just want them to know that the history exists. So now I'm going to do the thing where I free-associate some explanations in a thread that will eventually become a blog post, a lesson plan, etc.

Exciting adventure of today: explaining swing to a music theory class. It should be a core curricular topic for American music theory students! But there is not a lot of pedagogy around it. Even jazz pedagogy has limited resources to work with. I collected all of my best examples and explanations here: ethanhein.com/wp/2021/swing-… But there is plenty of room for growth here.

I started reading Organized Time by Jason Yust, which centers rhythm and musical time in its study of harmony and structure in canonical classical works. It's heavy! global.oup.com/academic/produ… Based on initial skimming, the book seems to confirm a suspicion I have about the evolution of functional harmony: that cadences were rhythmic/metrical events first.

I have made the executive decision that when I cover time signatures in class, I'm only doing the top number. I barely understand the bottom number and consider it to be an advanced topic. If you can steer me to an explanation of the bottom number that isn't a mass of tautologies, please do. All I have is "larger number down there means count faster."

If you want to know how weird it is for a rock/country/jazz musician to take tonal theory classes at the university level in the US, let me give you a hypothetical. Imagine I develop a theory of American popular and vernacular music that is based around the blues. Not such a stretch, right? A lot of it is based on the blues. In my theory, though, EVERYTHING is based on the blues.

Cadwallader's thing about the intense intellectual rigor of making Schenker graphs is interesting to me. Like... he's not wrong! Doing that stuff right takes a lot of time and effort. Unfortunately, "rigorous and demanding" is not the same thing as "valid." Like, I'm sure transmuting base metals into gold was very complicated and labor-intensive too!

Last night in Popular Music Practicum, a student asked what to do if your jazz band has more than one bass player. She wanted to know if there is precedent for multiple bassists in jazz. The answer is, not really, but a few examples exist. John Coltrane used two bassists in a couple of recordings, mostly from his later, more avant-garde years. My favorite example is "India" from Impressions:

One reason I aspire to write books for commercial presses rather than academic ones is that commercial presses don't make you put everything in the goddamn passive voice We wrote our whole book in second person, figuring it would be more engaging if it felt like we were talking to you, the reader. And now the editor is having us put it all in passive voice. Uggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh.

Okay! Clearly, you people want to read about Schenker! Here, I will add some context to this NY Times article so you can understand who this Schenker person is, what his contribution is to music theory, and why you should care. nytimes.com/2021/02/14/art… Disclaimers: I am not a Schenker specialist. I did write about him in grad school a bit, but there are many people here who know his work better than I do. I'm sure they will be responding to this thread with corrections and clarifications and I defer to them in advance.

Nothing makes me feel older than to listen to a track with some sample on it that sounds like it came off a warped record. You kids with your seasick detuning, get off my lawn! A crystal clear example of "I know I only hate this because I'm old, but I can't make myself not hate it." I will never penalize a student for doing it, I know they think it sounds good.

Public-facing note to self: tell the story of my learning jazz guitar Okay, so the story of my learning jazz guitar is this. When I was in college, I was a completely self taught rock/blues player. I worshipped in the church of Jerry Garcia and wanted to start learning jazz to chase down that aspect of his style.

Narratives of Mozart as a magical genius grind my gears. I firmly believe that "talent" is not innate. It's the product of means, motive and opportunity. Even in Mozart's case.

https://twitter.com/StevenIsserlis/status/1335175565440131078

Mozart was from a musical family with a berserk stage dad who drove the kid mercilessly to develop his abilities from a young age. That had the benefit of making for an incredible musical imagination, but also crippled him in non-musical aspects of his life.

I have some defenders of status-quo music theory pedagogy following me, so to you, I offer a thought experiment. Imagine that I run a travel agency. Any time anyone wants to go anywhere, I insist that they first get in my time machine and go to 1820s Vienna.