Preamble: Since writing my article on Music and Evolution, I have received many emails asking the same question: How does harmony and the movement of chords function in conjunction with the harmonic series and our ability to predictively ‘hear’ simple resolutions to complex wave relationships? This article will try to answer that question by delving […]
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Voice from the Past: Escape from Yugoslavia & My Grandfather’s Ominous Warning
April 2, 2024 
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I. Prologue My family on both sides were Germans from Hessen who migrated to Hungary in the 1720s, likely for economic reasons. Over a century later, Emperor Franz Josef I announced that he would allow Protestants to settle in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the region now known as Croatia. They moved there in 1865, but […]
Continue reading Strange Bedfellows: Jazz and Pop and Heinrich Schenker?
March 14, 2024 0 Comments
I. A Brief Introduction to Schenkerian Analysis Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) was an Austrian musician, composer, and most notably, music theorist whose ideas about analyzing and explaining music were groundbreaking and successful. Along with other theories, like Allen Forte’s “Set Theory” and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Serialism” (two mathematically oriented theories of analysis (Set Theory) and music composition […]
Continue reading Music and Evolution: Hearing Math, Seeing Sound, and Other Unanswered Questions
April 8, 2022 3 Comments
Music and Evolution: A Brief Overview The evidence presented in the research on music and evolution, beginning with Darwin himself,[1] focusses largely on music’s purported ability to support “mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion,”[2] language development,[3] and other things. The prevailing evolutionary theories about music follow Darwin’s lead—they are predominately sociological, cultural, […]
Continue reading A Tale of Two Genres: The Surprising Similarities in the Development of Jazz and Classical Music
January 1, 2022 1 Comment
Jazz and classical music are two of the most monumental achievements in human history. Together, they encompass a range of expressive capability that is simply astounding, giving voice to the human experience from centuries past to the present and in doing so, enriching our lives immeasurably. This is more remarkable when one considers that they […]
Continue reading Jack Hues and the Muse: The First Thing You Need is Music
June 16, 2020 1 Comment
In the world of rock and pop music, the most successful musicians and groups tend to emerge in their early 20s with a burst of creativity that few can sustain past a handful of recordings. Unlike in classical music and jazz, where musicians and composers continually develop and evolve well into old age, rock musicians generally […]
Continue reading The Touch of Your Lips, Part III: The Essential Touch in Jazz Piano
April 10, 2020 0 Comments
It would be nice and tidy if the development of tone color as a primary in jazz piano matched its development in the other instruments, but that is not the case. From early on in jazz’s history, composers and bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and others were focused on the different tone […]
Continue reading The Touch of Your Lips, Part II: Touch and Tone Color in Jazz Piano
April 5, 2020 5 Comments
As mentioned in Part I, tone color took on a prominent role in classical music in the 19C. The Romantic composers like Wagner, Strauss, Berlioz, Chopin and many others were, I think it is fair to say, somewhat obsessed with it. The composers before them were certainly aware of tone color, but it was […]
Continue reading The Touch of Your Lips: The Colors of Jazz Piano
April 3, 2020 3 Comments
The idea that pianists are able to create different tone colors and different timbres on the instrument has been passionately discussed for well over a century. For some performers, the sound can be a musical identifier on par with a fingerprint, which is a strong argument for their ability to coax a wide array of […]
Continue readingFraK on “All About Jazz”
March 13, 2020 2 Comments
Happy to announce that some of my articles are now being published at “All About Jazz,” which is one of the finest jazz resources on the web. It’s been a “go to” for me for many years, so really an honor for me to be a contributor there. Here are the first articles: Cold Fusion […]
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