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The Ethan Hein Blog

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The Ethan Hein Blog's title: The Ethan Hein Blog – Music and related topics

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The Weight

There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like they are talking about ordinary people in ordinary situations, but they don’t add up to any specific identifiable reality. The devil makes an appearance. There a...


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What I learned from remixing "Dreams” over and over

I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any specific key or mode at all! That’s an extraordinary level of ambiguity for a song whose melody only u...


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Twelve remixes of "Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac

I’m working on a podcast episode about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, a perennial object of debate in the music theory world because no one can agree what key it’s in. This is because the melody doesn’t align with the chords particularly, and neither the melody nor the chords belong unambiguously to any specific key. To demonstrate its harmonic flexibility, I got the vocal stem s...


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Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate

Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter.

In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein

The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one


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Free improvisation

Recently, I went to see a performance by my NYU colleague Ramin Amir Arjomand, whose counterpoint class meets on the opposite side of the wall from my pop theory class. Ramin’s concert was an hour and a half of extremely intense free improvisation on unaccompanied piano. It wasn’t jaz...


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