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Week 2A

· Read 2/22/21

This class was just introducing each other and sharing the songs we chose and what about them we're interested in. I shared "Carrying the Banner" from Newsies, timestamp 3:13-3:43, because I liked the energy build-up in that section and the overlapping singing.

  • Adele Someone Like You - standard piano accompaniment, potential case study
  • Adele often alters the pace at which chords change as marker for different sections
  • Balakirev: First composer who started using diatonic modes, inspired by Russian folk songs, in mid-19th century
  • "How Zoom works... some of it is quite opaque to me"
  • Pentatonix is from Texas (near DFW)
  • Research on underlying mathematical structure of pentatonic scales, how different cultures talk about them; pentatonic autocorrected to Pentatonix

Piano Lab 2/23/21

  • Today's attendance (missing one person) included two 051 students, me (301), and a 302 student
  • Hopefully we get our MIT-provided keyboards soon :D
  • My background: piano lessons 3rd-8th grade, got to "intermediate" level (playing adapted/easier versions of classical pieces), plus a little bit of experience in choirs that used sheet music
  • Classical music is intentionally written, musical theater/pop songs are improvisations written down — can be unnecessarily hard to read
  • Knowing chord progressions will enable us to improvise
  • We'll get a private lesson time, but show up at 10:00 anyway, just muted and deafened until individual time