Study Questions and other Resources    back to syllabus

Everett article   Jazz concert audio   Folio article    Butterfield article    Spicer article     Garcia article

STUDY QUESTIONS: Walter Everett. Making Sense of Rock's Tonal Systems. Music Theory Online, Volume 10/4 (December 2004).  http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.04.10.4/toc.10.4.html. Listening search list

What are the author's basic premises?

How does he focus or limit his study?  

Listen to the songs he discusses. Some of them I list here:

Billy Joel, She's Always a Woman, The Stranger, 1977
Beatles, Julia, 1968Beatles, The Long and Winding Road, 1969
Paul Simon, The Sounds of Silence, 1964-65
Beatles, Tomorrow Never Knows, Revolver, 1966
Beatles, P. S. I Love You, 1962
Rolling Stones, Brown Sugar, 1971
Beck, Get Real Paid, 1999
Paul Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years
Chuck Berry, School Days
Robert Johnson, Walking Blues
Robert Johnson, When You Got a Good Friend
Wilson Pickett, In the Midnight Hour, 1965
The Kinks, All Day and All of the Night, 1964
Jimi Hendrix, Spanish Castle Magic, Axis: Bold as Love, 1968
Beck, Lonesome Tears, Sea Change, 2003  

What do the author's graphs reveal? Be ready to discuss the graphs and ask questions.

What do you gain in understanding harmony and voice leading through this study?  

Do you disagree with any of the author's basic premises?Are there important aspects of harmony in rock not considered in this study?  

Come up with more songs that you are able to discuss in terms of Everett's classifications:.

COME READY TO PLAY AND DISCUSS EXAMPLES YOU HAVE EXPLORED. Let's use all our performance resources in class to consider how familiar chord patterns map to the guitar and keyboard, and, how they may serve as vehicles in songwriting.

Audio examples for upcoming UH Jazz concerts (Thank you, Tim Kochen!)

BillEvansWDR_BigBandCoolEddie.mp3
KendorMusicVol_28_Sole_Stains.mp3
UHJO_LongWay_on_a_Blues.mp3
FridayNightAtTheCadillacClub.m4a

STUDY QUESTIONS: Folio, Cynthia. 1995. “An Analysis of Polyrhythm in Selected Improvised Jazz Solos.” Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann. University of Rochester Press, 103–34. eReserve  Listening page

Familiarize yourself with the audio clips by Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy
 
Be ready to discuss these key words and concepts:
     polyrhythm (three types: a, b, and c)
     meter
     hypermeter
     structural downbeat
     structural anacrusis
     accent
     displaced downbeat
     rhythm/contour analysis
 
Cynthia Folio compares artists through their treatment of polyrhythm. Let's see if we can do this ourselves, but bringing in our own polyrhyhtm examples for discussion. Let's try to find some polyrhythm examples from a broad variety of musical syles.
 
The article discusses emotional effects of polythythm. Let's try to continue that discussion. How do polythythms shape meaning and the affective qualitites of music?

STUDY QUESTIONS: Matthew W. Butterfield. The Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-Based Musics. Music Theory Online 12/4 (December 2006). http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.06.12.4/mto.06.12.4.butterfield.html

How does Butterfield build upon but also differ from Charles Keil in conceptualizing expressive microtiming?

Discuss Christopher Hasty's theory of metric projection, as explained in the Butterfield article.

In what ways are metrical projections hierarchical?

How can a backbeat be timed to change the feel of a groove pattern?

What are some empirical threshholds mentioned in the article that limit boundaries of human perception of rhythm?

What are Butterfild's main points in studying the Chameleon pattern?

What have you learned from this article concerning the timing of swing patterns?

STUDY QUESTIONS: Mark Spicer.  “(Ac)cumulative Form in Pop-Rock Music.” 20th-Century Music 1/1 (2004): 29-64. eReserve Listening search list

Explain Spicer's concepts of cummulative and accumulative form. Cite examples.

Discuss connections between minimalism and pop/rock as explored in the article.

Explain the main points of Spicer's analyses of songs by the Police and Yes.

Comment on Spicer's closing remarks, discussing some ways that pop-rock recordings "tend to foreground the temporality of the music text."

STUDY QUESTIONS: Luis-Manuel Garcia. On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music. Music Theory Online, Volume 11/4 (October 2005). http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/toc.11.4.html

How do issues of authenticity figure in valuing repetition?

How have the writings of Freud, Adorno, and Schoenberg each contributed to notions about repetition?

How does Garcia bring together elements of ethnomusicology, popular music criticism, and music theory in establishing his methodology for studying EDM?

Can you propose counter-arguments to critique ideas in the essay? Can we really locate “pleasure” and “process” within repetition itself? Are those not attributes or byproducts of some entity that undergoes the repetition?