The Ethan Hein Blog
Time 2022-08-09 04:31:44Web Name: The Ethan Hein Blog
WebSite: http://www.ethanhein.com
ID:275096
Keywords:
Ethan,The,Blog,HeinDescription:
The Ethan Hein Blog
Music, Technology, Evolution
Patrice Rushen’s memory songs
Posted onWhite people do not generally grow up listening to Patrice Rushen; we have to seek her out. I only got hip to her when I heard her speak at the 2018 Ableton Loop conference in Los Angeles. I quickly learned that she co-wrote and produced one of the bangingest bangers in history.
The devastating bassline is by Freddie Washington, and the silky smooth sax is by Gerald Albright. I don’t normally go in for this style of R&B sax, but that solo is too funky and on point to resist.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditBach Anxiety
Posted onSomeday I want to write something long about Bach. (Maybe I’ll call it Bach to the Future, ha ha.) I have been slowly building toward it by doing a lot of Bach analysis here on the blog. My pandemic project has been learning movements from the D minor, G minor and E major violin partitas and sonatas on guitar. I can play these pieces slowly and badly, but I’m having a great time doing it. And I have learned a ton from remixing them:
I want to write about why Bach is so much more appealing to me than the other composers of his time and place. This story is as much about Bach’s reception history as it is about the notes on the page. Michael Markham has a good summary of that reception history in his essay, “Bach Anxiety: A Meditation on the Future of the Past”, from the 2021 book Rethinking Bach. If you don’t have university library access, Markham explores the same themes in this Los Angeles Review of Books essay, and also in this one. Let’s dig in! Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditLed Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues
Posted onThere is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.
Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.
Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditGroove: an aesthetic of measured time
Posted onAs I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.
Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditHuman Behaviour
Posted onHere’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them!
This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video was directed by Michel Gondry, the first of many.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditElizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime
Posted onDust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her.
If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditI Wanna Be Your Lover
Posted onIn addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the thread, first because he once tipped Quest $100 for having the audacity to slip Miles Davis’ “Milestones” into a DJ set. But of course the thread also talks about Prince’s own music, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover”. This reminded me that it’s one of the best funk songs ever recorded, and that I should transcribe it.
Songfacts says that Prince wrote the song about Patrice Rushen, who did some synth programming on his first album. They never got together, though. As with so many of his classics, Prince wrote, performed and produced the track himself. The album version includes a longer jam at the end, and rightly so. It’s a killer funk instrumental in its own right. And it’s Prince jamming with himself!
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditBetty Davis and the blues sus4
Posted onI heard this Betty Davis song while I was doing a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop and the guitar riff grabbed my ears. In this post, I explain why, and what the riff can tell us about blues harmony.
First of all: is this music blues? You might argue that it’s a funk song. It is a funk song, but Tony Bolden’s book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk makes the case that, well, it’s right there in the title. The sixteenth-note swing of funk is different from the eighth-note shuffle of the blues, but they share the same harmonic structure, and the same general cultural context. Betty Davis makes the connection explicit in this song, which is all about her and her family’s love of the blues. Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditWarp factor
Posted onIn this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditPsycho Killer
Posted onRead my entire Talking Heads series here.
I connect more to Talking Heads’ Afrobeat and funk-inspired material than to their more “song-y” material, but, I mean, this is the archetypal Talking Heads tune, so I can’t not write about it.
“Psycho Killer” is part of a particular family of Talking Heads songs that also includes “And She Was”, “Cities” and “Don’t Worry About The Government“: a collage of simple musical ideas that do not have any obvious relationship to each other. This makes the songs feel comfortingly familiar within each section while also feeling jarringly weird every time they move from one section to another.
Continue reading
Share this:
ShareEmailPrintFacebookTwitterLinkedInTumblrPinterestRedditSubscribe to Blog via Email
Social Media
BandcampDeep Dream GeneratorFacebookInstagramLinkedInMixcloudPatreonSoundCloudSubstackTumblrTwitterYouTubeTop Posts & Pages
Can science make a better music theory?Toward a better music theoryScales and emotionsElizabeth Cotten's fingerstyle ragtimeLed Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the bluesThe backbeat: a literature reviewMaking chords from scalesPatrice Rushen's memory songsBach AnxietyBlues tonalityCategories
AutobioMiscellaneousMusicCompositionDanceImprovisationKey MusiciansMusic BusinessMusic TeachingMusic TheoryRecordingSamplingPoliticsCopyright and AuthorshipRace and IdentityScienceEmotionEvolutionMathPhysicsSociologyTechnologyHardwareInterfacesInternetSocial MediaSoftwareVideo GamesUncategorizedVideoVisual artWritingRecent comments
on Patrice Rushen’s memory songs on Bach Anxiety on Bach Anxiety on Bach Anxiety on Bach AnxietyPages
BioBookClassesMSU Music Technology 101NYU Music Education Technology PracticumContactCurriculum VitaeDissertationGroove PizzaMusicVideoTags
AbletonAmericaBachBeatlesbluesclassical musiccompositioncopyrightdancedigging the cratesdrummingelectronicaemotionEvolutionfunkgrooveguitarharmonyhip-hopimprovisationinterfacesjazzJohn ColtraneloopingmashupsmathmemesMichael JacksonMIDIMiles DavisMusEDLabmusic teachingmusic theoryNYUPhDpopQuorarecordingremixesrhythmrocksamplingsongwritingvisualizationwhitenessMeta
Log inEntries feedComments feedWordPress.orgLoading Comments...<<< Thank you for your visit >>>
Websites to related : APA Committee on the Status of W
HomeHighlighted PhilosophersMissionCommittee MembersPublicationsData on Women in PhilosophyStatus of Women at Individual Departments with Graduate Pro
Home | The Northern LightClick here to support The Northern Light
Introduction - The Malleus MalefSkip to the contentSearchThe Malleus Maleficarumof Heinrich Kramer & James SprengerMenuAbout UsTable of ContentsDownloadsCommentsMenuSearchClose searc
Anti-CAIR: The Proven Truths AboLet There Be No Doubt That The Council on American-Islamic Relations Is A Terrorist Supporting Front Organization That Is Part
The Law Offices of Barton MorrisSkip to contentContact Michigan's Most Aggressive Criminal Defense Team | (248) 541-2600HomeCriminal Defense DUI DefenseDriver’s License RestorationD
Jarls blogSpring til indholdetSøgJarls blogUafhængig liberal blog om dansk politikMenuForedrag eller moderatorFølg mig på FacebookKontakt Jarl CorduaOm Jarl
IADC® Therapy with Dr. Allan L.Induced After Death CommunicationA new therapy for healing grief and trauma.Dr. Allan L. Botkin, Psy.D.(847) 680-0279DrAL53@aol.comHomeExperiencesReso
Me&Thee Music, Marblehead, Mass. Celebrating 52 years of great acoustic music28 Mugford Street, Marblehead, Mass.
Enable JavaScript to view protected content.
Doors open at 7:30 pm &#
HomeAbout Butler ResearchSubscribeFree Arc
The Sperm Count Report - Male FeSkip to content Main Menu HomeCategoriesMenu ToggleMale FertilityHealth ConditionsMedical ProceduresReproductive AnatomyFertility SpecialistsRec
adsHot Websites