Hello – I’m back after an extended absence involving a big project I’ll be taking the wraps off of soon.
In the meantime, enjoy some DJ Rashad – respectfully posted after his sudden and tragic death last month. I just discovered Double Cup in January, and his posthumous work is being featured on Hyperdub 10.1, which I can’t wait to get my hands on.
Ethan Hein: Everyone Can & Should Be Making Music
A long treatise, but worth the read. Some big thoughts that are obvious to too few of us in the Music Ed world:
Not everyone needs to be able to play or appreciate classical music. Maybe people just need to be able to sequence basslines for their hip-hop tracks, or play three-chord rock, or understand a little music theory, or play rumbly ambient one-chord drones. The kids who want to dive deeper and move on to more challenging material can still do so. If everyone else is engaged actively with music, the pros will find they’ll have a much bigger and more enthusiastic audience. And maybe America will be a little less emotionally barren.
And also:
If we want music not to be “dumbed down” we need to be honest about where sophistication lies. If you want to learn about functional tonal harmony, by all means go to the classics. If you want to learn about rhythm, go to Africa, the Caribbean, India, Indonesia and American dance music. If you want to learn about timbre and space, go to electronica and hip-hop. Pretending that all the answers lie in scores written by men in powdered wigs is the real dumbing down of the music curriculum.
What I don’t get is why there aren’t more people getting out there and saying these things. What worries me is people my (and Ethan’s) age still bristling at these ideas.
Slightly off topic, but a good critique of the school-grade band/choir/orchestra-music publisher industrial complex :
It was a nice enough, if completely unmemorable, piece. But why, I kept thinking, couldn’t they sing a real Elizabethan madrigal? Or how about a Beatles song? Or anything at all that has inspired and touched and sent shivers down the spine the way great art does?
Also:
If high-school English teachers stopped assigning Shakespeare and Faulkner and instead gave their students the winner of the 1991 Iowa English teachers’ novel-writing contest to read, I think we’d know where to tell them to get off.
Who says music researchers are stodgy? Some interesting new research going on at McGill that could someday work to improve beat detection in all kinds of music software:
An essential first step in understanding how various producers uniquely use percussion, melody, and harmony in their tracks is downbeat detection (to find the first beat of every measure). We’ve developed a style-specific method of downbeat detection catered to Hardcore, Jungle, and Drum and Bass (HJDB) by combining multiple forms of metrical information: low-frequency onset detection; beat tracking; and a regression model (SVR) trained on the timbre and sequence order of breakbeats. In a recent evaluation using 206 HJDB tracks, we demonstrate superior accuracy of our style-specific method over four general downbeat detection algorithms (including two commercial algorithms).
Read the rest at Breakscience.
A slightly older song, but a pretty good example of politically charged music from the last couple years.