May 2026 — I rebuilt my website and wrested it from the scratchy clutches of Squarespace. No more paying for the privilege of dragging JavaScript blocks. Enough! And now I can render God’s-honest LaTeX in blog posts. If my infatuation with Shakespeare overtakes my better judgment, I could switch the whole site’s typeface to freakin’ Garamond. What a time to be alive.
I am using so-called Eleventy as a framework. It is working fine. If any friends want my help building a similar site — mostly static text and images but with little .mp3 players plus BandCamp/YouTube embeds, and a simple blog that’s easy to edit — let me know.
Melody, rhythm, and harmony: the RPG triangle of musicteaching, the borders between them porous indeed — but I will not be such a curmudgeon as to totally deny this structural view of what music is made of. Yes, those words mean something! Where I do get grumpy is in their weights in the classroom. If you take so-called “music theory” in college you’re really just taking harmony class. I get why — harmony is the easiest of the three to learn, the easiest to teach, and the easiest to pull away from the actual playing of music. That’s not to say it’s all that hard to theorize about rhythm or at least think hard about it and practice it as a craft. Melody is too-often treated as this intangible, ineffable, unteachable spiritual force — nah! Learn about the modal theories from Persian music, Arabic music, Indian music. Those guys think hard, in systems, about melody. Eye-opening, or, rather, ear-opening.
All that said, we do love harmony, don’t we? You have to. It’s the West’s greatest contribution to music — no, not the only game in town, but the grammar of vertical sonorities moving through time makes your mind buzz and your heart flutter, doesn’t it? I have thus undertaken a casual Great Chords project as a way to fire off a few paragraphs every once in a while highlighting those mind-buzzing, heart-fluttering moments that hit you when the harmony is just right. This way, when I am long gone, an alien flipping through the charred remains of a hard drive recovered from the bombed-out Cloudflare headquarters will remark, “this guy had good taste.” And to the extent my readers are friends and colleagues who are jazz musicians known to dabble in composition and arranging, I may be able to pull the needle away from the Berklee-hivemind system of harmony and back towards the older, more robust knowledge that classical and jazz musicians inherited and commented on way back when. Great harmony does not make great music on its own but wrong, inconsiderate harmony can make otherwise good music smell funny. And indeed it’s easy to teach and learn!
Some day Princeton University Press may offer me a juicy advance to put in words the whole system of harmony as I see it. They may not. In the meantime, you will find below a growing list of posts picking apart special individual moments, peaks of the mountain range of harmonic composition, each of which contains at least one lesson about how to put pitches together. If nothing else, they should warm you up on a cold day or spritz you on a too-hot one.
- A long post about the Tristan chord, a bit different than the others here;
- Tchaikovsky — Sixth Symphony, ♯ivø7
- Puccini — Tosca, ivø7