Breakbeats in the Classroom (part 3)

December 26, 2020

There are any number of ways to talk about breaks, so I’ll just list a few ideas here. In Part 2 of Breakbeats in the Classroom, I listed seven possible ways to use breaks, starting with looping the break and ending with extracting the groove and applying it to another beat. A common dismissal of the use of breakbeats—and by extension, of the people who use them—is the claim that by relying on pre-existing material, you’re not making original music and therefore aren’t a musician, or a musician of serious art, etc.

On Teaching and Research in Higher Education

December 14, 2020

At the start of day one of my orientation as a full time professor, we all sat in a large room and listened to multiple administrators tell us that “Georgetown is special because we value teaching and research equally.” After this and a few more institutional platitudes, the administrators concluded the welcoming ceremony, turned the proceedings over to three professors, and left the room.

On race and gender

November 26, 2020

I’ve spent a significant percentage of my life in school, eventually earning a Ph.D and then moving to the other side of the desk as a professor. In the entirety of my studies—literally decades of coursework—I had no exposure to race-critical studies and almost no exposure to gender-critical studies.

Looking back now, this lack is certainly what I regret most about my time in school. A lot of the blame is on me, because those courses were available and I could have enrolled but chose not to. I had no real understanding of what they were, how they pertained to my life, or why I should take them, so I didn't. That choice is telling on me.

Breakbeats in the Classroom (Part 2)

November 6, 2020

Playing with breakbeats
1) The first, and most obvious thing you can do with a breakbeat is to loop it without changing anything, or with only very minimal changes. Below, I’ve quantized the break slightly by placing the downbeat of each bar on the grid, but otherwise leaving things untouched in order to preserve some of the “live” feel. You can see this visually by looking at beats 2 and 4—you can see the snare is hitting behind beat.

Breakbeats in the Classroom (part 1)

November 1, 2020

Overview
This is going to be a series of three posts (at least), organized in the following manner. In this first post, I’ll provide a brief and basic introduction to breakbeats, aimed at those who haven’t worked with or studied them before. The next post will look at some of the ways we can use breakbeats as a creative basis for new music. The third post will make the case for including breakbeats as a part of a basic music theory curriculum and examine some of the moral/ethical questions involved with using breaks.