arrange • compose • conduct
I spend part of most days writing music. And a small but significant portion of that time, every single session, is focused on musical clarity. Why focus on clarity? Alice Parker says that only 5% of the music you can imagine can be notated, so why worry so much about […]
Until you learn attain sufficient music literacy, every piece you learn is an island. One of the biggest gifts music literacy can give you is the gift of perspective. That is, the ability to recognize common characteristics from one piece to the next. Imagine you are an explorer in the […]
I try to address pertinent areas of music theory musical literacy throughout my teaching – whether private, academic, or ensemble. Here’s why. Mastering musical literacy makes everything else you’re doing work more efficiently. It’s the grease on the axle that keeps you moving swiftly. The point of musical literacy is […]
Adam Neely is a bassist and YouTuber who makes outstanding explanatory videos about music, especially understanding contemporary music (jazz, rock, pop, etc.). His most recent video is a must-watch. Please watch it to understand more about the cis-white-male-centric world of traditional music theory. I’m teaching a Jazz Theory course at […]
One of my favorite reharmonization tools in the arranging toolbox, when used sparingly, is the pivot reharm. A pivot reharm is when you keep the original melodic note, but use it as a different part of an unrelated chord. For example, a B-flat can be the 5th of an E-flat […]
“Whenever I hear [A], I know [B]” I’m allergic to musical opinions made in the above form. For example, recently I heard someone say something along the lines of, “Whenever I hear a half-step modulation in an arrangement, I know that the arranger has run out of ideas.” Maybe we […]
What is music theory for? Here are a few possibilities… A barrier to weed out insufficiently “studious” musicians from college programs. A set of “universal” concepts that all musicians need to understand to be successful. A set of tools for more efficiently describing the music we are working with. An […]
In his marvelous book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman two related learning models. The first involves the determination of the sex of day-old chickens. It was based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional [chicken] sexers could not report what those cues were. Instead, they […]
There are three pieces of information present in a Roman numeral analysis of a chord. The root of the chord. (Shown by the Roman numeral, which refers to the scale degree of the root.) The quality of the chord. (Shown by the case of the Roman numeral, and possibly an […]
I am committed to amplifying more music from Black culture in teaching music theory, ear training, and repertoire. As such I want to amplify these resources from my old friend Justin Binek, who has begun creating an online, freely accessible repository of examples. Included as of now are interval examples […]