Allow me to backtrack a few years (summer, 1978): I was chosen as a small pool of composers to attend the Berkshire Music Center, aka, Tanglewood. There I met composers and performers from all over the country and studied with Gunther Schuller. I was fortunate enough to win the coveted Koussevitzky Prize in composition for […]
Many of my readers, seeing that I have a Ph.D. from Harvard, and am a Professor at UCLA, assume that I’m a stuffy, grey-haired dweeb/nerd who always speaks in perfect sentences, thinks only scholarly and proper thoughts, and have a lovely wife, with 2.3 children and a faithful old bassett hound that sleeps by the […]
In my imagination as well as in recent emails, I have been asked:
“WHY are you writing this book?”
“This will not further your career, and you will likely lose even more respect from your colleagues (contemporary classical composers).”
[Tough shit.]
Are you having a mid-life crisis?
[NO! a mid-life exhuberance!]
Have you dried up as a composer?
[Au contraire, I’m writing […]
The tradition of American composers quoting music by other composers goes back to the Bohemian-born early American composer, Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781 - 1861), known as “the Beethoven of Louisville, who quoted “Yankee Doodle” in a number of his compositions. The notorious Charles Ives (1874 - 1955) quoted band tunes, hymns, patriotic songs, and other […]
Today we discussed two songs: “Go or Go Ahead” and “I Don’t Know What It Is.”
Go or Go Ahead
Another excellent class with passionate and excellent interpretations of the songs. The juxtaposing concepts in the opening lines (”thank you” vs. “bitter knowledge,” “guardian angel” and “stranded”) were cited as strong ironic images. The religious/sacred imagery […]
Or something like that.
I discovered a gold mine of wonderful literature about the materials of popular music through soundscape.info. There is a lot of material from a musicological point of view, but I’m interested in finding the nitty gritty about notes, chords, form and such. Author and music theorist Elizabeth Marvin suggested I read Walter […]
I am thrilled to have re-discovered Alan W. Pollack’s brilliant analyses of songs by the Beatles as examples of ways to discuss form, structure, harmony, and melody in popular songs. I will spend some time poring over these analytic nuggets and report on them. If you are curious, look at them and send me your […]
I keep asking myself: is it true? It seems there isn’t any music “theory” about popular music. My colleague David Lefkowitz wanted to write about Cole Porter in his upcoming theory text book, but the cost of reprinting the entire score was prohibitive.
Music majors are made to study analytic methods of approved composers like Beethoven […]
Here is my shortest analytic essay that does not involve too much music theory, one that I’m hoping RW fans will understand. I’d like your feedback as to whether it is clear to you. You may want to review Describing form and phrase structure in case you’ve forgotten my technique of mapping musical phrases to […]
“A hook is a musical idea, a passage or phrase, that is believed to be catchy and helps the song stand out; it is “meant to catch the ear of the listener” (Covach 2005, p.71). This term generally applies to popular music, especially pop music.” (Wikipedia)
There is a difference between a hook and a riff. […]
[Background: I am teaching an undergraduate 1 unit Freshman seminar at UCLA on “The Music of Rufus Wainwright.” The students are mostly Freshman, and are not music majors. I will post my somewhat scattered recollection of the class, and hope that the participants will post comments to correct, clarify and amplify their thoughts. Others are […]
I discovered a most remarkable piece of information today: a list of the 365 top selling songs of the 20th century as compiled by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). I encourage you to spend a few minutes and look down the list to see what songs have charmed Americans for the past eleven […]
In the Baroque, Italian composers deemed melody as the most important element in a composition, whereas French composers held melody as subordinate to harmony, melody being merely the top voice of a progression of chords. This is clearly an oversimplification, but these philosophies have resonated down through the ages. Some songwriters come up with a […]
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