Events

For day 11 in this year's Blogging A-to-Z challenge, we take a look at keys. Not the ones on a musical instrument, but the ones on a staff sheet. A key designates which scale the piece (or part of the piece) uses to establish its tonality. In this year's very first A-to-Z post, I showed you the four principal scales (major, natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor) that Western music uses most of the time. In that post, you may have noticed that the major scale had the notes C through C without...

It's just past midnight in Brussels, and it appears the UK hasn't crashed out of the EU yet. Britain has until October 31st to figure their shit out. And the world shakes its head.

Now that you know everything about harmony...oh, wait. Because regular old harmonies have nothing on jazz. So for today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry I'm going to lift up the curtain on some pretty wild stuff. I'm actually not going to have a lot of musical examples today. I'm merely going to point you toward other places that do it better. I will, however, draw your attention to the greatest jazz musician in history: Bach. He improvised the way that other people breathe. And he influenced modern...

Today I'm going to write about a topic that would have come second in any reasonable course on music theory. But in the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, sometimes the cart does come before the ox. Because even though I've already shown you the German 6th chord, fugues, and a reasonable harmonization of a simple melody, today I'm going to show you intervals. An interval is simply the distance between any two notes. If the distance is one note, we call that a second; two notes, a third; and so on, up to seven...

We have actual spring weather today, so instead of reading things while eating lunch I was watching things, like this corgi: I do have a few things to read while coordinating a rehearsal later tonight. To wit: New York City declared a public health emergency because of measles. Measles. A childhood disease we almost eradicated before people started believing falsehoods about vaccination. White House senior troll Stephen Miller has the president's ear, with predictable consequences. Where did all of...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge entry builds on yesterday's by adding a third voice to a simple two-voice example to create harmony. Simply put, harmony is any two notes sounded together. But in practice, harmony involves chords, which comprise groups of 3 or more notes sounded together. Let's start with a recognizable melody: Now I'll add a bass line, to give it a little more depth (and, for astute observers, outline the chord progression that we'll hear in step 3): So there are implied harmonies in...

After President Trump disbanded the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment  in August 2017, the group got back together on its own: The panel is now known as the Science to Climate Action Network (Scan) and has now completed work it would have finished for the federal government, releasing a report on Thursday warning that Americans are being put at risk from the impacts of a warming planet due to a muddled response to climate science. “We were concerned that the federal...

The Blogging A-to-Z challenge now takes you back about 1,100 years to the beginnings of Western music: Gregorian chant. Simple plainchants go back before people generally wrote music down. In the late 9th and early 10th centuries—around the time of Pope Gregory I—we start to find some of the earliest written examples of simple monophonic chants. Some remained part of general liturgical music well into the 18th and 19th centuries, like this example: Here it begins a performance of the second movement of...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago's annual fundraiser has consumed my weekend and will continue to munch away at my week.  Tickets are still available. Come out and hear us! It's wicked fun. And somehow, I'll write the next six A-to-Z posts on time...

Today's Blogging A-to-Z challenge post will discuss a form of music that, sadly, doesn't turn up much anymore. I say "sadly" because the fugue is one of the most intricate and difficult-to-write musical forms, but also one of the most satisfying when done well—and no one did it better than old J.S. Bach. At its most basic, a fugue takes a short musical subject and tosses it around two or more voices in counterpoint; that is, each musical line (voice) stands on its own as a melody, but the melodies...