Blog

  • Resources for Jazz Guitar: three octave runs

    A lesson on diminished, altered, lydian dominant and whole tone scales for intermediate to advanced jazz guitarists.

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  • Resources For Composers: Violin Pedagogy

    Here’s a list of the classics of violin pedagogy.

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  • New Fiction From Writer Nora Maynard

    I really love this short story, “Back In The Tudor House” by Nora Maynard. It takes off in an unexpected direction. You can read it at Pangyrus By the time I reached my late parents’ house, the truck was gone. The nicotine-streaked walls were white now and all you could smell was paint. Every four-poster…

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  • Fun With Triad Cycles

    A quick post about cycling through major triads within a narrow range.

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  • The next note is never more than a whole-tone away

    I first learned of the exercise of running different scales into each other from Barry Harris. You start near the top of your instrument, and as the chords change, you change your scale but keep going in the same direction. Relatively easy on a tune like Autumn Leaves, pretty difficult on a tune like Giant…

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  • A fun way to derive the melodic minor scale

    This thought just occurred to me as I was listening to the audiobook of Frank Wilczek‘s excellent Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. The melodic minor is a 7 note scale consisting of only semitones or whole tones, but with no 2 consecutive semitones (put another way, it is “locally diatonic“) The whole tone scale is…

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  • The “Minor 6/9 Shape” Harmonized

    During our weekly jam session this week, my friend Tony and I got into a discussion about a harmonic topic we’ve both been looking at. It’s an intervallic shape that’s pretty useful harmonically and melodically, and has a good ‘modern jazz’ feel to it. You can see the shape in example [A] below. You might…

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  • A few tidbits on the melodic minor

    Thoughts on using the melodic minor in different harmonic contexts.

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  • Tidbit: Locally Diatonic Scales

    I was reading an article by Dmitri Tymoczko this morning, Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration, and came across a useful term: locally diatonic. This refers to a scale whose seconds are all minor or major, and whose thirds are all minor or major. This includes the following scales: major, ascending melodic minor, whole-tone, and…

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  • Tritone Fun Facts, Part One

    This post kicks off a miniseries on tritones. I’ll use the terms tritone and diminished 5th somewhat interchangeably. This post covers some basics, the next one will explore an idea about key signatures, then I’ll look at diminished 7th chords.  Let’s start by considering the seven natural notes. If we place a natural note a…

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  • A busy week in jazz, and writing!

    I had a busy week in NYC seeing great jazz and then writing about it in a new blog that Nora Maynard and I are launching called cultured nyc. First off, I caught two nights of the legendary Barry Harris at the Village Vanguard. Then, I saw the amazing hard-bop sextet One For All at…

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  • Altered Scale Minor 3rd Transpositions

    A guitarist on the forum of Dave Stryker’s class at Artistworks recently asked an interesting question that really piqued my interest. The question is, can you transpose the altered scale in minor thirds, the same way you can transpose the diminished scale? I’ve been thinking for a while about how the diminished, altered, and whole-tone…

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  • Quartal Harmony: Tetrachords

    In today’s post we will continue our series on quartal harmony with a quick look at quartal tetrachords. When we began with dyads, we saw there are three quartal dyad types: P, A, and D. With quartal trichords, there are nine types (3 * 3). With quartal tetrachords, we now have twenty-seven types (3 *…

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  • Quartal Harmony: Trichords

    Today we continue the discussion on quartal harmony with trichords. Yesterday’s topic on quartal dyads was a bit of a warm-up. Things are getting more interesting now. There are three varieties of fourth: perfect, augmented, and diminished, or using our labels, P, A, and D. In order to construct a trichord, we need two intervals.…

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  • Quartal Harmony: Dyads

    More follow-ups to my recent visit to the Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop. I attended master classes with four great jazz guitarists: Corey Christiansen, Dave Stryker, Mike Di Liddo, and Craig Wagner. All four of these musicians gave me things to work on. One of the discussions that we got into with Corey was about quartal…

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  • A Mode For Every Day Of The Year

    I just got back from two weeks at the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop. It was amazing, as always, and especially important since this is the final session before Jamey retires after running the “camps” for over fifty years. I sat in on Pat Harbison‘s advanced music theory class, and I got some great ideas…

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  • A Glass-Steagall Act For Journalism

    I haven’t written anything about politics for quite some time, even though that is more on my mind than probably any other topic during this Trump crisis in America. That will probably change. Along with everyone else I know, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we got to this point and how we can…

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  • NEUROLOGICALLY DIVERGENT – A Dramatic Recitiation

    Earlier this month, the Pulitzer prizes were announced. As stated by the Pulizter organization, the music prize is awarded For distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000). The music prize was first awarded in 1943 to William…

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  • Early Beethoven

    I’m only 21 pieces in so far, so I will need to pick up the pace to make it through all 194 pieces with opus number this year. Right now, I’m listening to the Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Major, Op. 12 number 1, and just came across my first “favorite moment” in these…

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  • Was Brahms Quoting Beethoven?

    I was listening to the WQXR broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall last night. It was an all Brahms program: The Academic Festival Overture, The Haydn Variations, and the first symphony. I grabbed my trusty old Dover score and followed along for the performance of the symphony. I was not paying too close…

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  • Beethoven Listening Project

    Nothing like a new year to start a new project! One of mine for 2018 is to listen to all of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, from start to finish. How would you like to join me? We’re just getting started with the Piano Trio in Eb Major, Op. 1 No. 1.

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  • Dear Damien Chazelle

    “Jazz.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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  • Mondestrunken

    Just watched Moonlight, and, happily, it’s great. Need to watch it again on short order. Don’t know if composer Nicholas Britell truly had Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in his ear as he wrote the score, but I had to listen to that piece right away on finishing the film. It…

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  • Drop-2 Chord Fun Facts

    FF#1: Outer Limits We’re going to talk a bit about seventh chord and four-part harmony here, so to keep things consistent, I’m going to refer to SATB for voicing, and keep pitch and string sets ordered from higher pitch to lower pitch. Drop-2 seventh chords are formed by starting with a close position seventh chord…

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  • On Claude Vivier’s Zipangu

    I just put up an old paper on Claude Vivier’s piece Zipangu. I think I wrote it in Carl Morey’s Music in Canada seminar back at U of T. I’m posting it (it’s in the “Writing” section of the web site) for a couple of reasons. Vivier’s life and career were both cut short in…

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