Harmony and the Harmonic Series: I-V to Rule Them All

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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Jack Hues and the Muse: The First Thing You Need is Music

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 […]

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Cold Fusion: The Search for the Jazz/Rock Unicorn

Part I: A Brief Stylistic History The fusion of different styles of music has been an explicit goal of many musicians in the 20C. In the early part of the 20C, many classical composers like Bela Bartok, Aaron Copland, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy were interested in incorporating early jazz and ethnic folk music into […]

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New Rock Vistas: The Gaze of Future’s Past

Rock is Dead? Long live the Hip-Hop King? Not so fast—while it is true that Hip-Hop/R&B have surpassed Rock in sales in the US, sales are probably not the best measure for the health of an art form. Sales figures measure popularity and revenue, which occasionally, but not often, coincide with innovative artistry. Perhaps it […]

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