practiceandpedagogy

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Rap and the Elements of Music

In my previous post I said that I would go back and link different pop genres back to the elements of music. I’ve decided to actually do that, and I’m starting with rap. I should preface by saying that I am a fan of rap and hip-hop but I am classically educated and also very extraordinarily white. I will be trying to take an educated view only of the elements of music used in rap, rather than social or political implications. There are a lot of great resources around that already. I highly recommend looking around for a more educated view on politics and society in rap. I will link any good articles in comments (or here with editing).

TIMBRE/TONE COLOUR

Rap uses a variety of tone colours in both its instrumentation and in the voices of rappers. A list of these colours with (hopefully clean-ish) examples include:

Raspy/Flowing – Juice WRLD’s vocals in Lucid Dreams (listening especially to his open vowels for raspiness)

Sharp/Pointed/Clean – Kendrick Lamar’s vocals in DNA (listen to how he articulates his words so quickly and cleanly)

Piercing/Heavy/Messy – Kanye West’s production in Runaway (listen to the piano piercing above the heavy bass line and Kanye’s layered vocals in the chorus, layered imperfectly so as to create a messy tone)

Big/Bulbous/Strained – Childish Gambino’s production in Redbone (the production on makes it sound really pear-shaped (bulbous) and hugely funky in general, Gambino’s vocals (in a super high falsetto) create a strained tone (also listen out for glockenspiel in the backing instruments!))

I often find that once students get a few examples of identifying and naming timbres they can really run away with it. Be careful that, in senior years, students do not incorrectly identify character as timbre. They are similar and intrinsically linked but not the same.

INSTRUMENTATION

Rap draws a lot of influence from black music of the recent past and draws on instrumentation similar to that in jazz and blues, but with a greater level of production. These instruments often include, but are not limited to:

Lead Vocals and Backing or Featuring Vocalists

A rhythm section with: Bass Guitar (sometimes Slap Bass) or Synth Bass, Drum Kit or Drum Machine (popularly using 808 sounds), Clean Piano

Countermelodies provided by: Synthesizers or less frequently Electric Guitars

Sound FX are often included and can include engine sounds, gun shots, vocal samples, all adding to the character of the piece

Production in general plays a huge role in rap. If your students are advanced enough, talk about choice of synth waves/drum samples/EQ choices (low-pass/high-cut is used a lot)

There are clear analogues between rap and other popular genres such as rock or pop and pop music is especially starting to blur into hip-hop so you could encourage exploration from that point. Keep in mind to try and choose artists who aren’t appropriating culture for the sake of tapping into the rap and hip-hop market.

FORM AND STRUCTURE

Rap uses a modified verse-chorus form – again, leading the way for exploration into other popular genres. Some features of the form are:

Intro/Outro

Verse (A sequence of lyrics/bars rapped by the title artist/s)

Hook/Chorus (A repeated line sung often by a featuring or uncredited vocalist or appearing as a sample)

Feature Verse (A verse rapped by an artist not credited with the creation of the song)

You can find nearly any other feature of regular verse-chorus form in rap, but those are some of the standout features.

RHYTHM

Rhythms in rap are one of the most important features and help to both define the genre, and differentiate the sub-genres. The clearest example is triplet rhythms in mumble-rap but there are a lot of facets that go into a rap piece’s rhythm.

Flow: Flow is the idea of where accents land within a rhyme scheme. Too simple a flow and it sounds childish (my name is Alex and I’m here to say, I really like school in a major way!) Too complex (or too poorly thought through) and listeners will lose the pulse of the music or won’t be able to tell how the rhyme scheme is meant to fit into the rhythm. 2Chainz is often cited as having “bad flow.” Word setting (where words land in the sentence and on the beat) is seen as less important than flow, sentences can run over bar lines and phrases. See this Vox video for more information. Flow is an ever-changing topic, but getting your head around an understanding is necessary for teaching rap elements to rap fans.

Ostinato: Despite rhythms being in flux in rap, the underlying “beat” (which can refer to all instruments in the rhythm section, not just drums) tends to stay very similar. If it does change, it is given time to establish itself. Listen to Armadillo by Balming Tiger and notice that in each verse (including the “chorus” verses) the beat stays the same with different sound effects and then the bridges [Lyrics: “wit’ me, VIP” etc. and then “call me mystery kanji” etc.] also have the same beat, different to the verses (hence – a bridge) but the same across the two of them.

Syncopation: Another link back to black music in the recent past, rappers use syncopation heavily in both their beats and their flow. This is less obvious than just starting a phrase off beat (although that does happen) especially because flow demands that words are almost constantly coming out of a rappers mouth. Listen for syncopation in the accents of words, where new rhyme schemes start, where words are given more time (duration) for emphasis. Use this to teach rhythms that are more technically challenging in notation (dotted quaver, semiquaver or the reverse (scotch snap) are used fairly often in rap).

MELODY

Rap melody isn’t often talked about in the classroom as rap is often seen as monotonous flow of consciousness kind of music but it’s obviously not. No two rappers are the same and even the more “monotonous” rappers have to differentiate their melody (whether it be through pitch or rhythm) to keep the listener interested. Here are two examples focusing on one rapper:

Q-Tip’s feature on Mark Ronson’s “Bang Bang Bang” is largely fairly monotonous, still, he legitimises by finishing his phrases cadentially moving downwards (sometimes up then down) and altering his rhythms slightly.

Q-Tip on his own group’s (A Tribe Called Quest) song “Can I Kick It” has a huge range, a theme which is continued by Phife Dawg in the second verse.

Melody is clearly a necessity, it’s just a lot more subtle in rap.

There’s no conclusion to this post. Do I need to add anything/other elements? (He asks to the no people who are going to read this). Is there a style of music that you’d like me to cover? (Western music only sorry!) Let me know

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Reflection – Pedagogy and Class Building

Having been sent an email recently from Tumblr asking me to confirm whether or not I wanted this blog, I’ve gone over my old posts and I’m not quite as embarrassed as I thought I would be. I am, however, coming back into this space with a different appreciation for how music teaching actually works, and with far fewer sweeping generalisations about the reality of music teaching. This post is mostly going to reflect on my past pedagogical posts (alliteration, boom!) and be really rambling in general – I’ve gotten very sick of essay form – but I’ll try and break it up into manageable pieces.

The reality of teaching music in a competitive environment, where your class is on the line if you don’t draw students in, is significantly more nuanced than texts would have you believe. You can spout as many mantras about the wonders of music learning or the need for the arts or any of that, but the fact of the matter is it comes down to a bunch of things which I will attempt (in vain) to list here.

1. Students need to be interested in your subject. They don’t really care about real world application, just that they like learning it.

2. Students need to be interested in learning from you. It’s all well and good that you can deliver content well, but building rapport is huge. Elective teachers are in the best position to do this because you meet literally all the kids. Talk to them, educate them in what they want to learn. That doesn’t mean flipping your program but if a kid prefers The Chats to Coldplay or Lil Nas X to Elton John then teach them through those lenses!

3. You need to know your stuff back to front. If a student doesn’t understand, you need to build them up until they do. You need to reexplain, draw diagrams, link back to past learning, do everything you can to make sure they’re on track.

4. You need to accept that some students who are good, won’t choose your subject. Some who are not so good, will. You are going to teach them all no matter what. And, last (for now) is;

5. You need to advertise. Use your rapport to pull kids back in. Talk them into it, chat to them on yard duties, in extras. Every opportunity to engage them, engage them!

If you want to build a class, then you have to build.

Speaking a little more to point 2 – as if it hasn’t gone on long enough already – it’s imperative that a music teacher knows about the zeitgeist in popular music. I’ll probably come back and make a list of ways to engage students interested by genre eventually, but if a kid is interested in rap, talk to them about it! Music learning is all about contextualising the elements of music! If they’re into rap talk about:

Triplet rhythms – trap music uses these in spades.

Production – Kanye West (despite being a dick) is an excellent producer, his vocal manipulation is up there with the best.

Chords – Rap is an evolution of black music and draws on those traditions. Jazz chords are huge in TPAB.

Texture, Vocal Tones, Samples!

Nurturing an environment where students can learn what they want to learn about our art form is the best way to keep them coming back. Expand their horizons once you’ve got them hooked. Cool you like rap? How about hip-hop? Soul? Funk? Jazz, Rock, Pop? How about we look for that same stuff in Western art music now? Bombarding kids with difficult stuff will only serve to ostracise you and your subject, no wonder kids hate maths after algebra!

Students enjoy learning difficult things if they understand. Teachers have all seen the click happen and it’s really wonderful, but that click can only happen if you start from a place of understanding, otherwise you’re doomed from the start.

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It should go without saying that these have been hard times everywhere around the world. My thoughts go out to the BIPOC and LGBT+ communities, without you we wouldn’t have any good music to talk about.

[practiceandpedagogy]

Music Teachers Teach Music?

A discussion I’ve had with a friend (who is a long term music teacher) recently has got me thinking about what the job of a music teacher is. He said:

“The hardest thing for a music teacher to do is to actually teach music.”

And he’s right. There is a difficult conundrum faced by music teachers at the start of every year. Do you make your year seven classes fun and hope that means more will choose music when it becomes an elective, or do you actually teach them what they need to know? Anyone will tell you it has to be a pragmatic process, but how? What can you do that makes the students learn theory as well as lets them have fun and makes them want to continue learning this art that we’ve dug ourselves into?

“You have to make students love learning, if they do then they’ll be set for life. They might not stick with music but at least they’ll enjoy it.”

To make a student love learning any subject there has to be a degree of excitement to what they are learning, a sort of cognitivist (BUZZWORD) discovery of what you want to teach them. This is easy in science because they just get to muck around (sorry science teachers) until it works (whatever it is) and then they’re taught the why. It’s harder in maths and english because students have to slog through theory and texts before they get to the exciting stuff, but WHO CARES YOU HAVE TO DO IT LOL. Music is different. There are ways to make it fun, but they largely don’t teach that much.

I disagree with Lucy Green’s philosophy of experiential learning in music. “Teach them what they want to learn and theory can come later.” It’s all well and good to teach pop music – I encourage it – but theory has to be intertwined and constantly compounding itself in a students brain. It’s not enough to suddenly say “SURPRISE YOU’VE BEEN DOING QUAVERS ALL THIS TIME” because by then it’s year 10 and it’s too late to teach them the fundamentals, they’re nearly in VCE (or HSC or WACE or A-Level or whatever). Lucy Green and Musical Futures need to be taken with a grain of salt in high school because otherwise your students won’t learn anything but how to play G, Am, C and D on a guitar (they won’t even know what those letters actually mean) and by the time you have to introduce hard theory they’ll drop like flies because music isn’t the fun wonderland it was in the early years.

Students need fascination, not a gimmick. If you can provide them with that, then you’ll be the best music teacher they’ll ever have.

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This Blog

Lots has been happening in my life and not much has been appearing here. I am approaching exam period but hopefully there will be some stuff coming here soon. Maybe, maybe not.

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Keith Swanwick – Assessing Music Musically

I recently read Keith Swanwick’s book, Teaching Music Musically which inspired a lot of thought on how a music student progresses as a participant in musicking. I’d like to share with you Swanwick’s eight levels of the music student. I don’t believe that these are stages reached progressively with age, rather, they are a process through which every person must go when coming to know a piece. Anything in [square brackets] is simply the removal of ‘s/he’ and changing the associated verb.

Level 1 – The student recognises sound qualities and effects, perceives clear differences of loudness level, pitch, timbre, tone colour and texture. None of these is technically analysed and there is no account of expressive character or structural relationships.

Level 2 – The student perceives steady or fluctuating beats, identifies specific instrumental and vocal sounds, devices related to the treatment of musical material such as glissandi, ostinati, trills; yet [they do] not relate these elements to expressive character and the structure of the piece.

Level 3 – The student describes the expressive character, the general atmosphere, mood or feeling qualities of a piece, maybe through non-musical associations and visual images. [They relate] changes in the handling of sound materials, especially speed and loudness, with changes to the expressive level, bur without drawing attention to structural relationships.

Level 4 – The student identifies commonplaces of metric organisation sequences, repetitions, syncopation, drones, groupings, ostinato; [they perceive] conventional musical gestures and phrase shape and length.

Level 5 – The student perceives structural relationships, the ways in which musical gestures and phrases are repeated, transformed, contrasted, or connected. [They identify] what is unusual or unexpected in a piece of music; perceives changes pf character by reference to instrumental or vocal colour, pitch, speech, loudness, rhythm and phrase length, being able to discern the scale in which changes take place, whether they are gradual or sudden.

Level 6 – The student places music within a stylistic context and shows awareness of technical devices and structural procedures which characterise and idiom, such as distinctive harmonies and rhythmic inflections, specific instrumental or vocal sounds, decoration, transformation by variation, contrasting middle sections.

Level 7 – The student is aware of how sound materials are organised to produce a particular expressive character and stylistically coherent formal relationships. There are individual insights and independent critical appraisal. [They reveal] a feeling of valuing music which may be evidenced by an account of personal involvement in a chosen area of music making and/or a sustained engagement with particular works, composers or performers.

Level 8 – The person reveals a profound understanding of the value of music due to a developed sensitivity with sound materials, the ability to identify expression and comprehend musical form. There is a systematic commitment to music as a meaning full form of symbolic discourse.

Audience-Listening Criteria (Swanwick, 2012, p. 73-4).

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Socio-Economic Status and School Placement

My teaching rounds have well and truly begun and therefore much talk is being done between fellow teacher candidates about their placement schools.

I come from a fairly middle class background, I went to a government school which had a pretty alright music program, then I went to an excellent university which allowed me to pursue both music and teaching. Amongst the aforementioned ‘talk’ however, I was disheartened to see someone post the socio-economic status (SES) report of where their placement school is, mentioning that it only had a few families in the top Nth percentile. The person in question was from one of the more affluent suburbs in my city, having never really experienced the lower SES side (as I have).

I quietly confronted the person about it and they apologised (not that I needed to be apologised to) and removed the post, but it was concerning that this future teacher thought it was a good idea to label people based on the amount of money that their family may or may not have. The suburb in question is undoubtedly fairly rough, but it must be understood that students attending school in these suburbs do it because they want to, not out of any sort of obligation to their parents (who in independent schools might be paying out upwards of $10,000 a year). And yes there might be a few bad eggs, but being placed in a low SES school is good for many reasons.

1. If you can teach effectively in the roughest part of town, you’ll be able to teach anywhere.

2. It’s highly unlikely that you (a graduate teacher) will land a job in any sort of prestigious grammar school (maybe even not religious schools) so you’d best get used to the idea of teaching to low/middle SES students.

3. It expands your horizons and empathy – you’ll see parts of the city you never have before and meet cultures you’ve never met before, some of whom will be the nicest you’ll ever meet.

4. The parents are less shit. Though they still want their children to learn, they appreciate the simple fact that you are trying to teach their children as best you can.

Don’t underestimate low SES areas, some of the nicest, smartest people I know come from them, some of the nicest, smartest people I know teach in them. Socio-economic status does not directly correlate to how good a human you are.

Good luck on your teaching rounds.

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This Blog

Hopefully more on the pedagogy side of things coming soon, until then, music and sociology are the go

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Women and Alt/Pop

I’ve missed the bandwagon on this one entirely and I also feel rather underqualified to talk about this simply due to my having a Y chromosome (and being cis-het), but it’s an important topic nonetheless and one to which I can add my two cents.

A month ago, Triple J’s Hottest 100 competition was won by The Rubens with their song Hoops. Whether this was good or not is a discussion for another time, but surrounding that time of year was the discussion surrounding the role of the Woman in Alt/Pop music. It was pointed out that there had been more winners from St. Kevin’s College in Toorak than there had women in general, and that’s just St Kevin’s having two. For the sake of pedants, there have been two female ‘winners’ but they were The Cranberries (lead singer Dolores O’Riordan) and [Angus and] Julia Stone. Hardly the same prestige as Chet Faker or Vance Joy.

Regular pop music is dominated by females so why is it that they have a hard time being accepted into the (supposedly) alternative viewpoint that Triple J holds? Surely such a liberal radio station would have liberal listeners.

The problem is complex to say the least. On the most simple level is the belief that the Hottest 100 is a meritocratic process. People vote for the songs that they like the best right? So is it just that women don’t have good alt/pop songs? My personal votes were all male lead songs, maybe they just write them better yeah?

I dislike Courtney Barnett’s music, I did when I first heard it, I still do. I also don’t particularly like The Rubens. It’s not just me either though. I know many people who love both or hate both, and however trivial and anecdotal the evidence is, it is evidence nonetheless. Courtney Barnett and The Rubens are as good as each other, so why did Barnett’s acclaimed album get beaten to the post by what The Rubens seem to have just squeezed out at the last minute? Because of air time.

The female alt/pop scene is a vicious cycle. Women typically don’t do well so they aren’t signed so they don’t do well. Big record companies have the money to fund longer amounts of air time for their clients, so they do, it’s smart business, but it leaves these unsigned/indie label women musicians with less potential to do well.

Courtney Barnett was a cult hit, but even that wave of expectation couldn’t hold back The Rubens. Triple J do try fairly hard to expose up-and-comers but there needs to be a shift away from the male dominated landscape that is alt/pop towards an equitable Australia Day (at least in terms of music).

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Congratulations to The Rubens for winning Triple J’s Hottest 100 2016, congratulations to Courtney Barnett for getting four songs in there (three more than the supposed winners).

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On Death and Fandom

David Bowie died on the 10th of January, 2016, in Manhattan, a day ago (two for us Australians but that’s just a date line thing.) His death, like many recently, shook the music world. His proliferation and influence was/is immense.

A friend of mine posted something on Facebook along the lines of ‘Why do people only care about celebrities when they die?’ in response to the outpouring of grief on social media. One of my first truly profound moments with music was listening to Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity,’ so I was taken aback when this accusation popped up. I don’t use social media to an exceptional degree and didn’t post anything, but surely this friend understands that the people who are posting must have had some sort of connection with Bowie.

Thinking about it though, I tend to cull my Facebook feed fairly harshly, so I probably don’t see the sheer amount of trashy posts that this friend does, and there does always seem to be a large focus put on famous people after their death. It’s a eulogy in a way, but to those who didn’t particularly care for the deceased it all seems excessive. I had the same kinds of thoughts as this friend after Lemmy’s passing (who even listened to Motörhead?)

We need to keep in mind that different people enjoy different people so that when a celebrity passes away, especially one you don’t really care about, other people might. That friend’s Facebook post has since been deleted.

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The Future of Sound

I’ve been thinking recently about the different textures composers use to define a moment in a piece. A big cymbal crash is the climax of the symbolic hero’s journey, or quick falling passages indicate turmoil. But when will that all become just another noise? Sure it’s all fairly obvious to us modern listeners listening to romantic or modern (or even pop) music what the different cues mean, but will that all become redundant over the next generation or ten?

I had a class once wherein the tutor/lecturer/conductor/whoever said that Mozart, when writing in a style he considered ‘Turkish,’ used cymbals, the bass drum, and triangle. All of these instruments are common in orchestras today, but not then. It is perhaps forgivable then, that when I listen to the overture from his ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’ (K. 384) I don’t immediately hear what’s so Turkish about it. I’d have to be told that it was meant to be Turkish to even be able to pick up on some stylistic elements that could be ‘Turkish’ but I’d have never chosen the percussion as anything remotely to do with the country.

It’s with this in mind that I wonder how much is left for music. The tritone, which has been a dissonance tool for composers for a long time, is becoming less and less awful to the ears, even outside of the classical realm (see: The Simpsons theme.) The increasing globalisation of the world is exposing us more and more to ‘non-Western’ forms of music, Carnatic and Hindustani (both Indian) music are probably the easiest to exoticise and mimic thanks to their different tone systems. There’s mathematical proof that we’ll never run out of music using the current Western chromatic system but maybe future composers will get sick of only having twelve tones to work with and move on to Indian classical systems.

There’s plenty left to be done with music but will there be a limit? A fundamental point where music can’t be exoticised any more? Will there be a time when we don’t even pay attention to the tritone? There might be a time in the future where musicologists have to look at Wikipedia pages to find out that there was ever a time where microtones sounded strange.

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This Blog

The purpose of this blog is simply to be a place to post my ramblings on music and education, perhaps music education in particular. Enjoy.