What we talked about in Music Theory today...

Whilst discussing voice leading by root movement of a third, art songs, fugues, and sonata form (it was a busy class!), a number of random topics came up. Here are some of them:

Animusic - a cool series of animated musical machines and robots

Pat Metheny's Orchestrion project - Animusic in real life.

Steve Reich's early minimalist piece, Drumming.

Bach's crab canons. This a piece that one player performs from top left to bottom right while the other performs backwards, from bottom right to top left--a retrograde canon. Because Bach was a genius, the two parts work together perfectly. I tried to find a good version of his "mirror" or "table" canons, where the players sit across from each other and play the music simultaneously right side up and upside down--a retrograde inversion canon--but I was unsuccessful. Sorry!

I also told my legendary Bach joke. I'm not posting it here; you had to be there...

I really love teaching music theory--I get to cover everything from parallel fifths to serialism and Bollywood to The Clash with a bunch of students who are just as passionate about music as I am!